Magazines and Periodicals

[vinteuil]

For those who haven't been following on Emery's talk page, there are most likely going to be some musical periodicals submitted to IMSLP fairly soon.

The question then remains of how to organize them.

My idea idea was to create a composer page for each magazine/periodical, in the category "Magazines/Periodicals" (not "People"!), and have a workpage for each year of the magazine, thus leaving room for individual articles, issues, etc. Issues are submitted to the workpage by year; articles are linked to it and kept under their authors' pages.

Thoughts/proposals/suggestions?

[steltz]

The word "journal" is used by most libraries, seems to encompass both magazines/periodicals, and may have a bit more scholarly tone to it, as well as being shorter and less cumbersome. The tag would be "journals" plural, a sub-category of writings.

Next question, though: do we need to distinguish between a whole journal and a single journal article? Like collections, it is possible to have both whole and part at the same time.

[vinteuil]

Agreed as per "journal"—I won't change the subject header for obvious reasons (IMSLP has one of those, too

[Carolus]

This seems like a logical way to handle the issue. There are quite a few of them out there, too. We already do a similar thing for performing organizations, like the University of Chicago Symphony, the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet, etc.

Actually, this brings to mind a related issue which I received an e-mail about recently. My correspondent thinks it would be most advantageous if IMSLP had a composer-type category page for each of the collected editions where one could actually download or view the complete volumes of the series. For example, I noticed that just today Sibley has posted all 13 volumes of Kullak's edition of Chopin's works. Perhaps there would be a way in which we could combine the existing pages for these collected editions or modify them into a such a page (moving the present contents listing to the 'talk' tab for the new composer-type page?). We presently have composers, editors, arrangers, translators, librettists and performers all within the "persons" category. Perhaps this would require the creation of new higher-level category - like "publications" - in which we could place the lower-level categories like 'editions', 'periodicals', and 'serials'.

[vinteuil]

I like the "publications" idea—I don't like the idea of the amount of work this is going to take to implement as per the old editions

[cypressdome]

It appears to me that the main problem with posting journals is to figure out what "composer" the works get posted beneath. While Perlnerd's proposal to treat journal titles the same as composer names solves that issue it introduces one problem that to me would make uploading journals quite burdensome. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, each year now becomes a separate "work" to be added to the journal's category. Instead of a single page to house the Hofmeister ''Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht'' it would require 118 pages with each page consisting of a single file for the entire year. Are we more likely to have users contribute scans of individual monthly/quarterly issues or single pdf files for an entire year's run that can be downloaded from Google Books or Hathi Trust (who has nearly 200 entries under the subject Music-Periodicals)? Since many music journals originated with music publishers could we not just add the publishers in as a corporate person. Instead of posting the ''Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht'' to Hofmeister, Friedrich it would be moved to Hofmeister, Friedrich (firm) according to the LOC authority records. Adding publishers as corporate people would also enable us to break up the Publishers' Catalogues (Various) category.

Cypressdome

[pml]

You’re going to hate me saying this, but anyway.

Publishers’ pages – which are doing a very useful job in holding vital information like succession of plate numbers, and other historical facts – should also have associated categories, which publications naturally enter when a work has a particular publisher’s work uploaded to it. This would not replace the information pages for the publishers in question, since having a category list won’t retain information like plate numbers, year of publication, etc.

As an example of the ease (?) of creating such a category, just now I added [[Category:Bärenreiter]] to the template we use to mark the urtext editions they publish (e.g. Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Berwald). As a result, the Wiki immediately added 14 pages to the category (and more will be added as the site gradually refreshes work pages).

At the opposite end of the time spectrum, publishing houses were often one-man affairs rather than monolithic corporations, and it would be historically interesting to have “publisher’s categories” for individuals like Riccardo Amadino (Monteverdi’s principal publisher), the various members of the Gardano/Gardane family, Andrea Antico, etc., since we are gradually obtaining first and/or early editions. We do, however, already have a page for Ottaviano Petrucci.

On a separate note, I am not sure we should have entities such as the University of Chicago Symphony, United States Marine Corps Band, Soni Ventorum and so on listed under the category of “People” but this is probably unavoidable without some slick programming moves on the relevant FTE pages.

Cheers, P.

[vinteuil]

I'm going to copy Emery's comments from his talk page.

This is a complex situation, and I don't think there is a particularly simple solution. The simplest short term solution might be to create a work page for each magazine. The problem with this, that Perlnerd666 brought to light, is the potential size of each category. For example, one periodical may have published as often as one time per week. Let's look at two possible solutions to this problem:

1. A majority of periodicals were probably not published once a week - so let's wait until the second solution to analyze this scenario. Most periodicals were published once a month, which means would be dealing with organizing 12 issues per year. I would not mind having a maximum of 60 issues category page, which means at this rate we are dealing with a 5 year time span. Since we have tabs, it may be easy for each tab to contain 5 years worth of periodicals. For example, one tab would be "1865-1870". Even this, however, could potentially generate an overwhelming number of tabs.

2. For works that have 52 issues per year (once a week) we might be able to implement some sort of accordion-type collapsible table. That would serve to organize all 52 without cluttering the work page what-so-ever. I'm not sure if this is technically possible as I'm not altogether familiar with MediaWiki, but it's something to possibly consider.

Another overarching solution to the problem is to create a non-category page for each journal (.org/Wiki/Name of magazine) that would contain direct links to the PDF. All of the information about the periodical would probably be listed in a template at the top-right of the page that I would need to create (infobox). Since the publisher information should be the same, it won't be necessary to have publisher information for each periodical except for the year (level 3 heading) and month (next to the PDF link). A table of contents would be necessary as well. The obvious problem with this solution is ease of submission. It seems as though the PDF files would need to be directly uploaded using the "upload" link on the MediaWiki sidebar. In addition, this is usually a frowned upon practice and might give the wrong impression to new users; consequentially, how about we consider this to solve both problems:
*We create a composer category page called "Periodical submissions" where any regular user can submit a scan of a newspaper, magazine, article, etc. Any experienced user can then transfer the article accordingly and delete the work page used upload the file.

As I've said before, I'm far from a librarian - and perhaps for good reason! Respectfully, Emery

[NLewis]

The accordion style collapsible table is a really interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that. Is this actually possible?

The second idea is also something interesting. I assume you mean something similar to the page for Catalog of Copyright Entries? I could see it working, but like you said, it'd be inconvenient for moderators. I guess that's something we could death with?

Thanks for the detailed breakdowns

[KGill]

What if we simply expanded the category tree to include more broken-down information? We could even use intersects to obtain the maximum searching power using the CW.
For instance, it could look something like this:
*Category:[Periodical name]
*Category:[Year] * intersect Category:[Periodical name] (Category:[Year] itself would just contain all issues of all publications from that year)
*Category:[Issue] (standardized form of date) * intersect Category:[Year] * intersect Category:[Periodical name]
**Individual work pages under names of composers/authors, tagged properly and put into the three categories, using some sort of adaptable template in the publisher information field
Now, after working this entire thing out, I have just realized that it still has a fairly serious drawback: there is no obvious place to put the full issues. One of my earlier proposals (made via IRC) called for a central table-of-contents sort of page that linked to each individual work within the publication. This has a number of drawbacks of its own, but if we did create a similar page, we could use it to house file entries of each of the issues. This would require a decent amount of programming to implement:
-New FTE template for publication TOC pages
-'Add file' option would preferably allow you to specify which exact issue (i.e., its date) you are uploading (through the use of dropdown menus or some such), and then automatically add a new section for that issue which would contain (a) the file entry for the issue and (b) a link to the category intersect necessary to locate the individual contents of the issue. The page would be broken down using various levels of subheadings
We might well also need some way of backlinking from the workpage to the TOC entry for the whole issue which contains it. I realize this seems rather complex, but what do you all think about its feasibility?

[vinteuil]

It would be really cool if that worked, but that's a lot of programming to be done...

[pml]

No grand thoughts from me at this stage. I would like to see how some of it would work on a miniature scale (a pilot!) before full-scale attempts to upload very large quantities of material. It would give a better idea of how fine-grained we would need to make categories/pages/uploads, and how the material would be organised/indexed/otherwise documented.

Cheers, PML

PS Total of 38 pages in Category:Bärenreiter. Notice that this allows those pages to be worked on as a group via the Category Walker — which might conceivably be a useful feature to someone (or might not).

[Carolus]

I agree with PML that we'll ultimately need to set up separate people or entity categories for all of the publishers. The challenge as I see it is to merge the existing category pages - some of which are pretty extensive with wonderful plate-number charts, etc. - with the entity-based pages, which also have some obvious advantages for detailed searching via the CW. I set up a category page for listing works reprinted by Kalmus some time ago, which is constantly growing as templates replace the manual listings for the reprint.

[imslp]

I'll just jump in and mention that, on the technical side, I agree with PML that any such major structural change needs a pilot first. There are probably problems that need to be solved which we won't even discover unless there is a pilot.

Also, in keeping with IMSLP tradition, I would strongly encourage reusing the current structure/technology to the maximum extent possible. I say this because it will greatly decrease the amount of headaches down the road, especially as now there are many programs (e.g. the iPad/Android applications, the music search, among others) that rely on the current structure on IMSLP. Essentially, I would try to implement the necessary features with the minimum amount of changes. This may seem a tall order, but I think it will benefit us in the long run.

[imslp]

Just a note that my above post should not be taken as me not liking the project; I would love to see magazines and periodicals on IMSLP. I had just wanted to point out (1) that a pilot might be nice, and (2) we should reuse as much of the structure as possible, and go from there (we can certainly make additional changes down the road).