The description of music

Re-thinking the principal possibilities for the description of music offered by standardised Unimarc and Intermarc formats allows their limits to be rapidly determined. In order to compensate for the gaps in the standard, three Parisian musical institutions have worked jointly on an original solution for describing the content of their music documents. This solution uses the block of 9XX fields, anticipated in the Unimarc standard for "local data" (needs specific to each library). Now, new approaches are being tried for the description of music: a joint consideration has in effect led to a commitment within the French and Italian Unimarc committees to development of the format. One of the essential outcomes of this work is the suggestion made by the Italian group for the creation of a new zone of coded data for describing the instrumental and vocal content of music documents.
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