Currently Sheet Music is listed as a format, but I think it will work better as a Genre.
Why it doesn’t work as a format…
A good format, e.g. Hardback can be applied to publications of a wide variety of content. Sheet music describes the content.
Sheet music could actually be loose bound, stapled like a magazine, paperback or hardback. All more descriptive of the actual format of the material.
Why genre may (or may not) be the right choice…
A simple definition of genre is “a style or category of art, music, or literature”.
On the face of it “Sheet Music” doesn’t fit this dictionary definition. But in real-life, if I go into a book shop, the sheet music is all shelved in one place, literature in another etc.
Sheet music is a high-level category rather than a strict genre, but we already allow other similar categorisations in the genre list, e.g. Non-fiction.
Certainly it’s better as a genre, I would say. I was going to mention this in the other thread, but I already typed a lot and I forgot about it.
Sheet music and monograph make more sense as a genre. You might even think of sheet music as another language. It’s about the form or presentation of the text or content written in the book, rather than the form of the book itself.
Yes, where two or more formats apply people will choose what they feel to be the most sensible. In the Lennon & McCartney case it’s a paperback.
I’ve already passed up submitting a pre-print preview/proofing copy of a book because it’s an e-book. Neither e-book nor “Printing/Uncorrected Proof” seem to be the preferred option when I have to pick only one. I’ll wait to see how things develop with formats.
I also have some sheet music books to submit at some point, and they’re probably more appropriately soft-covers.
In cases where sheet music is literally sheets of paper, unbound, a different Format seems more sensible, depending on its precise presentation.
I suppose they’re together because they both represent loose sheets, it’s just that one means collected in a binder with either string or punch-hole fixtures. I guess ‘folder’ ought to be included in that, too. It seems logical to me.
I wonder if the Cain’s Jawbone and sequel are eligible here. I think they would be, since they’re technically books; albeit with pages loose and out of order. I think they would qualify as ‘loose-leaf’.
Similar could be said about magazines, zines, textbooks, and literary journals, at least. They come in various physical formats. E-books come in various digital formats.
Looking at the genre and format lists, they are a mix of physical formats, publication types, literary forms, genres, and subjects. It would be difficult to separate all of them, but maybe it would be possible to do some organizing…
Do they ever come with a binder? At least when I was studying, the binder was not included. But I’ve only seen textbook ones.
That is still not something I would think of using for a piece of paper folded in half. I do know that some sheet music have more pages than just four, and some are loosely bound or stapled. Maybe booklet and/or leaflet would work?
Also, it seems that a lot of places nowadays use the term printed music as an umbrella term for all printed musical notations: songbooks, folios, full scores, single-song sheet music, etc. Maybe that would be a better term to use, or do we want to include them all?
Sheet music? I don’t know, but that format option won’t only cover sheet music; merely include it where relevant.
I remember my brother, when he used to study music as a child, getting sheet music loose in shallow card boxes, and sometimes in those card folders with a pocket in one inside face.
Because sheet music probably gets published in all sorts of binding and cover types, we’d be just as well off using whichever of those is appropriate for the Edition, and set the genre to “sheet music” or something similar.
The bottom line is that musical notation is more about the form of the information in the Edition than it is about the form of the Edition itself. Analogous to a book being written in French, or Hebrew, or Mandarin, or Braille, etc.
Things like Braille are more format-like than sheet music, since sheet music will typically also have elements in spoken-language alphabets. Perhaps we should treat Braille and Music Notation as if they were another Language?
Even better. Are there different flavours of Braille?
It may be that we’d need another dedicated field to catch this sort of special case, simply because it’s a bit more significant in its presentation as usage than “just another font”.
We may be back to format being a minimal set of basic categories with optional tags within them. If we can cater for detail, without being obliged to use them in every case, or pour over each of a hundred same-level choices to find the right one, that would probably be the best case implementation.
Discussion has gone a bit off-topic over the last couple of days (probably my fault for starting two different threads so close together ).
There’s been some useful discussion, and I like the suggestion to simply call it Printed Music as that avoids getting bogged down in how the material is bound or not. However, this is still descriptive of the content similar to other terms like “Literature” (a genre) in my opinion.
Perhaps the real challenge is that Format is a “choose one only” option, so we must make a choice what to use.
If I have a big hard bound copy of Beethoven piano sonatas, I would use “Hardback”. If I am searching for printed music I won’t subsequently find it.
My gut feeling is that Genres should allow browsing like the sections in a book shop or library, and it just makes sense that sheet music is shelved together (unless you are in a specialist shop, where it will be shelved by instrument).
I’m very happy to adopt “Printed Music” as a genre if everyone else is.
Genre would work well where a book contains more than just printed music (but still be a significant element of the publication).
One point of note: genres are applied only at Book level, so would there be any scenario where ‘Printed Music’ would apply to only a subset of Editions of a Book, but not all Editions? Any editions of a title, only some of which contain printed music?
No, the loose-leaf / “binder ready” textbooks the “Loose-leaf/Binder” tag was created for.
Exactly, and I was specifically talking about the single-song ones, and which format to use for them. If Sheet Music is removed from the Formats list, then there’s no good fit. Nothing there accurately describes them.
They are often four to eight pages. The four-page ones are never bound because it’s just a folded piece of paper. The eight-page ones are either loose bound, not bound, or gently stapled. Booklet and/or leaflet would be more suitable for them than anything else I can think of.
Agreed, and that is yet another functionality that was not imported. They were linked and browsable in the old Bookogs.
I have to admit that I don’t quite understand some of the changes that were made. I still confuse Book/Edition because the real world terminology is different.
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