I found it in WorldCat. Where is it in reality?

March 13, 2015 9:02 AM

I'm doing some research on a recording made in New York in 1949. WorldCat has information on two photographs taken at the recording session, and a taped interview with the conductor. The trouble is that they have no information on any libraries that hold these items. What am I missing here? We have information that clearly came from someone looking at the photos and listening to the tape, but where are they? Thanks for any help. WorldCat links below the fold.

Photo - Krasner and Mitropoulos
Photo - Mitropoulos and ensemble
Recording - Interview with Mitropoulos

posted by in278s to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

I am a cataloger. Usually when WorldCat has a good bibliographic record for an item but no holdings, it is because there used to be holdings but they have been removed because the item was lost/destroyed/removed from the collection where it was once held. It's also possible that the owning library still owns the items but removed holdings because they did not want Interlibrary Loan requests for them.

(There are also system-generated records with no holdings and that may mean that the item is new and no libraries own it yet, but that does not appear to be the case here.)
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:44 AM on March 13, 2015

Worldcat! You may not be missing anything. Worldcat is a huge records accumulator but they only display availability information, if this is the same as it used to be, for member libraries. My hunch is that when a library ceases to be part of Worldcat, their records stay there but they no longer link to an institution.

So Australia, for example now has its own big catalog called Trove and they have a record for the interview, for example, which is findable via Google (because they have superior tech). They claim that it's in the Library of Congress in the US. Searching the LoC catalog gets this record which says that item is available at the LoC.

On that topic, I'm not sure if you've seen this which also showed up in a Google search for that sound recording which has other Mitropoulos-related stuff that is poorly indexed (I don't think the search works at all, for example). You can page through a lot of pretty interesting stuff and the New York Philharmonic might have better leads on someof that stuff.
posted by jessamyn at 9:45 AM on March 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Another librarian here. Looking at the cataloging view of Worldcat, the records look like they were originally created by the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC. The Institute no longer exists, and it looks like all their materials have been transferred to the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna. I did a quick search of a few of their databases and didn't find any of your items, but you might want to have a look, too, and contact the Center for more information.
posted by fussbudget at 12:05 PM on March 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all! It makes sense that these items would end up at the Schoenberg Center. I'll contact them.
posted by in278s at 1:26 PM on March 13, 2015