A Wednesday Update Summary as Marching Season begins
Good morning, and thanks to all for the incredible support to the gradual development of this archive.
Several hundred new catalog entries have gone into the archive, covering publishers whose output has been hard to trace in any one place.
Two sources fed this. The first is the vinyl record: the promotional and demonstration LPs put out by Hal Leonard Charter Publications, , and Jenson Publications, whose sleeves and labels list the arrangements the records were pressed to sell. The second is the United States Copyright Office registration record, which is where Belwin-Mills, Columbia Pictures Publications, the Neil A. Kjos Music Company, Rubank, and a number of smaller houses filed what they printed.
While these have been present on the site since the inception of the sheet music system, I feel a few tweaks warrant an explanation for catalogs vs work entries.
A catalog entry is not a copy. It is a record that a particular arrangement existed, from a particular publisher, in a particular year, with a citation saying where that claim came from. The archive holds no scan of most of these, and that is rather the point of listing them. A piece nobody has contributed yet now has a page, a title, an arranger credit, and a button to watch for it, instead of being invisible until someone happens to own one.
If any of these are sitting on your shelf, the entry is already there waiting for them. Citations to other works can be found in many places, including dedicated catalogs, score samplers, and sometimes even the covers of preexisting works. In the near future, I do plan on expanding the archive’s support for catalogs and have it be an integral part of the sheet music system, this is part of the reason why “links” is a present field on sheet music, as it’s intended as a means of navigating to works or archive entries that mention its existence.
Recordings live in one place now.
A piece could previously carry recordings against its catalog record and against the copy the archive holds, and only the second kind raised the headphone marker in listings. Anything filed on the catalog side was effectively invisible. They have been merged onto the piece itself, so a recording now shows wherever that piece appears.
There is an activity log at the foot of the sheet music page.
New pieces, new recordings, new catalog entries, and the links made between them, each with the time it happened and a link to where. A small thing, but an archive that changes daily ought to be able to say what changed.
A few fixes.
Cards under "More like this" were splitting into two boxes on any piece with nothing scanned yet.
Thumbnails were cropping through the middle of the page, which is typically where nothing of note is; they now favor the top, where the title usually sits.
The edit form for a piece can set a cover image and label a part, both of which it should have been able to do all along. And when you contribute something the archive already holds, the warning now links straight to the existing page and to its edit form, so adding your copy to it is a click rather than a hunt.