National Library News July 1998 Vol. 30, no. 7-8

The National Library of Canada's Disc-o-logue Web Site

by S. Timothy Maloney,
Research and Information Services

The original Disc-o-logue index was created by Louise Lamothe, who sold it to the National Library of Canada (NLC) in 1986. It consisted of close to 90 000 3" x 5" index cards listing data on primarily French-language sound recordings which were commercially available in Canada from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. All types of music were covered, including pop, classical, sacred and jazz, but Disc-o-logue was particularly strong on mainstream French-language pop, country and folk music, with a high percentage of Canadian content. It constituted a detailed discography, for the period in question, of the songs of such Canadian musicians as Madame Bolduc, Les Classels, Diane Dufresne, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Pauline Julien, Jacques Labrecque, Le Soldat Lebrun, Félix Leclerc, Monique Leyrac, Jacques Michel, Ginette Reno, Les Séguin and Gilles Vigneault, among many others, as recorded by themselves and, subsequently, by other artists. In fact, the period covered by Disc-o-logue is considered by some to have been a "golden age" of French-language songwriting.

Mme Lamothe began to compile her index in 1958, just as LPs and 45-rpm discs began to circulate widely, and as 78-rpm recordings were becoming obsolete. The production of sound recordings in Canada between the mid-1950s and early 1970s has not been generally well documented, and many Canadian discs from that era are neither catalogued nor held by the NLC. The mechanism of legal deposit ¹ for sound recordings was established in Canada only in 1969, a year before the NLC's Music Division was created, and the deposit of discs by many manufacturers was not routine until the early 1970s. As a result, much information contained in Disc-o-logue would be difficult, if not impossible, to find elsewhere, even at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, and particularly in such comprehensive form. For example, many of the Quebec record companies referred to in Disc-o-logue were small and are now defunct. Acquiring this index for the NLC was seen as extremely important both to assist the retrospective acquisition of recordings by the Library for its national preservation collection, and to support future research by discographers and historians of popular culture. The NLC continues to seek out and acquire Canadian sound recordings issued prior to the mid-1970s.

Mme Lamothe created the Disc-o-logue index for her own use as the owner of a record store in La Tuque, Quebec. In addition to maintaining the index on file cards from 1958 to 1985, she published annual cumulations of the data, entitled Disc-o-logue, from 1962 to 1979. This publication was sold, along with periodic supplements, on a subscription basis. The original intent of the published Disc-o-logue was to share information on new French-language recordings with other record-shop owners and radio stations for purposes of ordering and promotion. Disc-o-logue eventually circulated to 550 subscribers throughout Quebec. Later, she also captured information relating to the copyrights pertaining to each song, in her capacity as manager of La Société des droits de reproduction mécanique du Canada Ltée (SDRM), the French-language mechanical reproduction rights agency for Canada which she founded in 1969 and managed until 1985. Since 1985 it has been known as La Société du droit de reproduction des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs du Canada Inc. (SODRAC).

Each file card contained such data as song title, composer, lyricist, performer(s), producer, format (e.g., 45-rpm, LP), and the dates of release and deletion from the producer's catalogue. The cards were filed alphabetically by two points of access: song title and performer. Before the card index was offered to the National Library of Canada, Mme Lamothe discarded the complete set of cards filed under "Performer", leaving access to the index only by "Song Title". Between 1986 and 1997, when the data were computerized, it was impossible to make substantive use of the index for any other types of searches.

Creation of the Disc-o-logue database and Web site was proposed and ultimately supervised by Richard Green, Head of the NLC's Recorded Sound and Video Collection. The digitization project was completed between January and September of 1997. It involved the following steps:

• inputting the data from approximately 90 000 index cards into an InMagic database program
• proof-reading and verifying the information in the completed database
• migration of the data from InMagic to Glimpse, a Web-compatible database application
• verifying that the data were uncorrupted by the migration
• design and creation of the Disc-o-logue Web site, including search interface, searching instructions and ancillary pages
• creating all appropriate links among the Web pages, the database and the NLC's main Web pages
• editing, testing and debugging the finished product.

In addition, the NLC had to obtain permission from Louise Lamothe to use the Disc-o-logue name on its Web site.

I wish I could report that inputting the data from the index cards was a high-tech operation involving scanning and optical character recognition (OCR), but the truth is that the index cards were difficult to scan with any degree of accuracy. A test batch was scanned via OCR but the variety of typewriter fonts and the existence of hand-written annotations on many of the cards necessitated time-consuming corrections to the computer files. Ultimately it proved quicker to use the old-fashioned method: keying data directly into the InMagic application.

Because of the size of the Disc-o-logue card index, the project to digitize its contents was managed in two phases. Phase 1 was undertaken between February and May 1997 using contract typists, with funds donated to the NLC by the Stentor Alliance specifically for digitization activities. By the end of May 1997, data from about 65 000 cards had been input. A second phase of re-keying took place between June and September 1997 using summer students with funding from Industry Canada's SchoolNet Digitization program initiative. The total number of records in the finished database reached 89 183.

The search interface is similar to those developed by the NLC for the Canadian Music Periodical Index (www.collectionscanada.ca/cmpi-ipmc/index-e.html) and for the three databases which form part of the Glenn Gould Archive Web site (www.collectionscanada.ca/glenngould/index-e.html). Key-word and key-phrase searching of the following elements are possible, both by individual fields and as a single index:

• title
• composer
• performer
• format
• label
• issue number
• date received
• date deleted from circulation

One detail not captured on the index cards was LP album titles, so the NLC's Disc-o-logue database lacks this information. However, the contents of LPs can be discerned by searching under specific issue numbers and issue dates. The date of issue for particular sets of song titles can be linked with album titles gleaned from other sources. A further stage of the project could add new fields for album titles and locations (for recordings not held by the NLC), but no enhancement of the database is planned at the present time.

The search engine for this database is Glimpse, a basic, Web-compatible search software which is being adapted by the NLC for individual projects while we test and evaluate several more powerful search engines. At present, search terms can be linked only by the "AND" operator, giving limited boolean searching capability on the Disc-o-logue Web site. Searches will return HTML-encoded Web pages which can be navigated using a Web browser. When the Library has chosen a full-text search engine for its Web activities, we plan to have Disc-o-logue and other Music Division databases on the Web migrate to the new software.

The Disc-o-logue Web site also includes a capsule history of the original card index and publication, biographical information on their creator, Louise Lamothe, images of the index cards and of pages from the published Disc-o-logue, reproductions of album covers from recordings included in the database, and some of Lamothe's listings of "Best Sellers" from that era. A "mail to" feature allows visitors to comment on the site or share further information with the National Library. Links exist from this site to other addresses on the National Library's home page and to other related Web sites.

The NLC is pleased to mount such an extensive body of discographical information on the World Wide Web. This project places the NLC in the forefront of international research on French-language popular music, as well as demonstrating the Library's continuing commitment to make its collections and access tools more widely available. For further information, please visit the site: www.collectionscanada.ca/discologue/index-e.html

Note
¹ A regulation which requires copies of books and commercial audio and video recordings to be deposited at the National Library of Canada to form part of a national preservation collection of print and audiovisual materials.

Adapted from Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML) newsletter