Song anthology - One PDF or many?

[haydenmuhl]

I did some digging through the FAQ, but couldn't find an answer to this question.

I've got the two volumes of Heugel's "Melodies de Reynaldo Hahn." These are basically song anthologies, and there is no specific reason that these songs need to be in these collections. Each book has twenty songs. How should I upload them? As two PDFs (books) or as forty PDFs (individual songs)?

One of the pages linked from the FAQ says to always scan the cover and title page, because it contains valuable information. This suggests uploading whole books, but I've had trouble finding individual songs before when they've been uploaded like this. Would attaching the cover and title page to each individual song solve this?

[KGill]

That, or you could just put the covers in one of the files and leave a note on every page which had a file from the collection saying 'Title pages for this volume can be found at [[pagename]]'. It is much preferable/always encouraged to split up collections of this sort (you might notice that pages for well-known collections contain only links to their individual works, and collections which haven't been split are marked for cleanup).

[haydenmuhl]

OK. Good that there's a best practice for this sort of thing. I will submit each song as its own PDF, but I don't think I will make a page for the collections themselves. I don't think they're that well known.

I will include the cover, title page and table of contents on the first song in each collection, and link the other songs in the collection back to the first.

[daphnis]

Let me also jump in and recommend that you following the scanning guidelines in case you've never scanned and submitted anything to IMSLP before. Scanning in 1-bit at 300dpi or better will save you some time and produce nice results.

[Boccaccio]

Why don't you put both online, the individual pdfs and one for the whole collection? This is what is currently done for madrigal books from BNF where we have one file containing all parts and one file for each part.

[haydenmuhl]

I had another thought.

We can have our cake and eat it, too. I've been playing around with redirects, and a redirect page can be made part of a category. If we have a single work page that has PDFs of many songs, we could make a redirect page for each individual song that links back to the work page for the song collection, or just redirects for those songs that are often excerpted.

For example, Mahler's Rückert Lieder. "Liebst du um Schönheit" is probably the most famous song from the set and is often excerpted, but not everyone may know to look for it on the work page for the Rückert Lieder. We can have a redirect that points to the Rückert Lieder work page, but would show up as "Liebst du um Schönheit" on the Mahler category page.

edit: Hm, this may be more appropriate for the Categorization forum.

[daphnis]

I, for one, would not vote to go that route as it is really a bandaid on a bullet hole type of solution. If an anthology contains many songs by different composers and from different sets, really the cleanest course of action is to split them up, which is what we've been doing. In the example you gave with the Mahler song, that is a single song from one set of songs by the same composer. A similar case exists for Debussy's "Clair de lune" which many people don't know belongs to the Suite bergamasque.

[haydenmuhl]

No, of course actual anthologies would not warrant having a work page. I was talking about the more cohesive song collections, like the Mahler, or the Debussy you mentioned.

Another good example would be Gabriel Faure. There's a whole list of work pages that are just "2 Songs" or "3 Songs", presumably because of their opus numbers. An understandable way to organize the library, but not terribly helpful when looking for a specific song. Some redirects would solve that, though.

[daphnis]

There's a whole list of work pages that are just "2 Songs" or "3 Songs", presumably because of their opus numbers. An understandable way to organize the library, but not terribly helpful when looking for a specific song. Some redirects would solve that, though.

Right, good point. This is specifically why I and I see others including librarians are doing a good job of including a whole list of songs/titles that make up the work in question. This makes searching the site for the song easy and prevents redirects from cluttering up composer pages (imagine if every Fauré song had, in addition to the set or opus to which it belonged its own redirect page). Not having these individual redirects is also useful to users because it shows them (I hope) that IMSLP is also here for their edification and not just a library.

[haydenmuhl]

There's a whole list of work pages that are just "2 Songs" or "3 Songs", presumably because of their opus numbers. An understandable way to organize the library, but not terribly helpful when looking for a specific song. Some redirects would solve that, though.

Right, good point. This is specifically why I and I see others including librarians are doing a good job of including a whole list of songs/titles that make up the work in question. This makes searching the site for the song easy and prevents redirects from cluttering up composer pages (imagine if every Fauré song had, in addition to the set or opus to which it belonged its own redirect page).

Clutter was one concern I had with this idea. If there are other strategies that make these songs easy to find without the superfluous links, then that would probably be preferable.

Not having these individual redirects is also useful to users because it shows them (I hope) that IMSLP is also here for their edification and not just a library.

I can't parse this. Can you elaborate?

[daphnis]

Hi again. I simply meant that by keeping pieces in the correct collections, we can also educate users about music rather than just provide them with the raw materials (ie. scores) they are primarily seeking.

[haydenmuhl]

I think having the redirects would actually facilitate that, because this won't actually break up the collections. If I want "Liebst du", and I click on the link for "Liebst du", it will take me to the Rückert Lieder work page. "Oh, hey, look at that. This song is part of a set."

One of the reasons I mentioned Faure, is because this exact thing happened to me. I was looking for "Le Voyager". The IMSLP search didn't turn up anything, even though the individual songs are listed on the work page. After googling around, I found out it was part of opus 18, which is listed on the composer category. Only after downloading the PDF did I realize that this set contained another Faure song I already knew, "Automne".

[steltz]

Would a songs list giving titles or incipits, and the set it belongs to help?