CT- right. I think you have to ask what your purpose in organizing is. Is it so you, as the present owner of these records, can find them easily? Or are you interested in working at the Library of Congress? I get curation, and Paul is no doubt correct insofar as musical history is concerned, but it would seem you’ll be spending more time curating than listening. I reorganized about 12k records a while ago, while getting rid of several thousand and eventually adding quite a few more. With classical, which is only part of the mix, I segregated some by label- EMI ASD, Lyrita, Decca/London, RCA doggie and Mercury Living Presence; I then alphabetized a large quantity (by composer)- say 20 linear feet; I also set aside one shelf for typical audiophile warhorses, and another for what I consider to be banal audiophile crap, which includes some direct to disc, not limited to classical. This, obviously, has nothing to do with the rock/pop or blues/jazz/folk (which are organized alphabetically, except where some have been segregated by label). That still leaves me with thousands of records that have yet to be organized in any meaningful way, from old MHS and DG to mid-’80s Euro-pop. It’s sort of triage, in my view.
I organized the stuff I was most interested in listening to, or was readily identifiable and it’s still taken years. Electronically cataloging with meta-data- a whole other thing. I like the fact that something like Discogs is basically already ’populated’ with the data (right or wrong), so you merely have to add the item to your collection, but are there similar "populated" databases that comprehensively address classical music? (I think of Discogs more for pop). Creating a database, with deep metadata from scratch, would be a huge endeavor.
PS: Paul- welcome to the madhouse!
I organized the stuff I was most interested in listening to, or was readily identifiable and it’s still taken years. Electronically cataloging with meta-data- a whole other thing. I like the fact that something like Discogs is basically already ’populated’ with the data (right or wrong), so you merely have to add the item to your collection, but are there similar "populated" databases that comprehensively address classical music? (I think of Discogs more for pop). Creating a database, with deep metadata from scratch, would be a huge endeavor.
PS: Paul- welcome to the madhouse!