Musical Works on OCLC, or, What if OCLC Were Actually to Become a Catalog?

Music catalogers and audiovisual catalogers have long had a problem with AACR2 because of its failure to deal adequately with works intended for performance. When a work intended for performance, such as an opera, is actually performed and the performance is recorded on video or film, many music catalogers consider this performance to be equivalent to a sound recording of the performance (which would be entered under the composer of the opera), while most film catalogers consider the video or film to be a work of mixed authorship to be entered under title (with the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, etc., considered to be authors of the same level of importance as the composer). This disagreement led to the creation of a task force by the Cataloging Committee: Description and Access (CC:DA) at the American Library Association and was one of the developments that caused the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR to convene the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR in Toronto in October of 1997 to discuss possible revision of the cataloging rules