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March 10, 2021
By Alexander Dean
As an undergraduate guitar major at the University of Akron in the early 1990s, I entered the library with a seemingly straightforward task: to find the score of Johann Sebastian Bach’s third cello suite, which I would be learning on guitar that semester. The card catalog had by that time been superseded by an online catalog, into which I entered these terms in various combinations. But although I received numerous “hits,” none seemed to promise what I was looking for; instead, I found a confusing multitude of recordings, arrangements, and other loosely related items. The ease and power of the online catalog had lured me into a mindset that allowed for a broader semantic representation of a piece of music than I had actually wanted. Now, in 2020, as an editor of critical editions, I wonder about the ramifications of that mindset—a universal change now that readers use general internet searches to interact with musical scores.