Nick Jones wrote:

>Please ramble on.  How does one access OCLC and RLIN?  Are there
>restrictions on who may use them?  How do you use them?  Where on OCLC,
>for example, are there listings of recordings?

OCLC are usually available in your local library.  Sometimes they will
allow a patron to search them.  At many universities, ours included,
faculty, staff and students can access both RLIN and OCLC with their
electronic IDs.

You use them with a search engine front end which will let you do keyword
searching and format qualifiers.  The database grows daily.  It will
contain commercial and non-commercial (unique) items and tell you what
library holds them.  Unfortunately most libraries will not do interlibrary
loan of recordings but at least one can identify what might exist.  With
any of these bibliographic utilities, one needs to keep in mind that not
everything that has ever been published is listed.  I would like to think
I have a decent knowledge of classical music recordings, yet it is rare
that a week does not go by that I encounter a listing or a reference to
a recording that I have never hear of before, a recording not listed in
either OCLC or RLIN.

There are many subject specific discographies like the Oja Discography
of American music...there is also a wonderful (but incomplete) listing
of Melodia records.  Relatively few Melodia recordings are listed in
OCLC or RLIN...all of those wonderful "politically correct" operas and
symphonic works written by composers of the former Soviet Union...

What really interests me the most are the broadcast archives around
the world.  The Austrian Radio archive in Vienna was untouched during
the war.  The same holds true for the archives of the Finnish and Swedish
radio.  Every now and then something will be issued, but most of it
remains locked away...and a substantial amount of it rotting away and
not listed anywhere.  It is estimated that there is approximately 50
million hours worth of distinct recordings held in institutional collections
with only a very small portion of it cataloged.  Very little of the
unique materials recorded on unstable formats, like lacquer discs, has
been reformatted.

While the quantity of recordings listed in either OCLC or RLIN can be
overwhelming, it is the tip of the iceberg.

Karl