Cataloguing

Annually the music library acquires 1000 to 1500 new classical scores and about 200 songbooks. Specialized cataloguers add bibliographic descriptions of these acquisitions to the electronic catalogue.
Apart from this these specialists are cataloguing retrospectively the sheet music that has been in the library's collection for decades (which was catalogued only on catalogue cards).
Below you can read a more detailed description of their work.

Cataloguing Rules
The Beschrijvingsregels voor gedrukte muziek and the Regels voor de catalogusbouw gedrukte muziek (respectively volume 7 and 11 of the FOBID Regels voor de titelbeschrijving) form the basis of cataloguing in our library. These cataloguing rules are derived from the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).
Applying these means that every name entry should comply with the form laid down by IFLA (Names of persons) or ISO.
In referring from variant name forms you will always find these standardized entries.
Click here for an overview of the standards used.

'Rules of the house'
To the standard bibliographic description (ISBD) data are added.
These concern mainly the instrumentation of the published composition and its composer. 
'House rules' have been developed in order to have a kind of standardization for these data too.

Principles
The Netherlands Radio Music Library strives to inform the users of the catalogue as good as possible.
To those in search of a specific composition or edition as well as to musicians interested in finding (new) repertoire it wants to offer many tools.
That is why the cataloguers put much effort in searching for information which identifies a composition (its original title, a thematic or opus number, year of composition), but also in entering data which facilitate the quest for repertoire. 
Therefore our customers can find orchestral works with at least one saxophone by Hungarian composers, German violin sonatas composed between 1850 and 1900 or choral works on French texts by Rilke.
 
The content of an edition
Our way of bibliographically describing the content of an edition goes further than most music libraries.
The parts or movements of a composition (e.g. the songs within a cycle) are entered in the bibliographic record.
Every edition comprising more than two works (anthology/songbook) will be “uitgecatalogiseerd” (= catalogued separately). With a unique number – the shelfmark – album and content keep their conherence in the catalogue.
 
We hope that, in using our catalogue, you will find what you are looking for (and more).