Istanbul Was Once Constantinople

I know I'm not alone in my yearning for a fully searchable catalogue for the Library. At present we have most of the titles captured; much of the other data about the sheet music, such as composer or lyricist names, are unrecorded or incorrect.

I'm helping with the task of data cleanup. We're trying to harmonize and simplify, to establish standards: there should be, for instance, only one way to attribute a piece of music to Ira Gershwin. All those "Gershwin, I." records in the current database are out of compliance. I change the attribution to "Gershwin, Ira," though I wonder if I'm erasing, as Virginia Woolf might have it, the only evidence of the obscure female lyricist Irene Gershwin.

Will nobody claim to have composed the Frick and Frack 1947 Encore?

Other questions trouble me as we try to harmonize the names of the cities where the music was published. The U.S. cities pose few problems—"New York City," not "N.Y." or "NYC." But what about the music published in czarist, Germanophobe Petrograd? Or that published in the tragically disputed places of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires? Trying to decide what to call the city known variously as Konstantiniye, Stamboul, and Constantinople makes my head hurt. Fortunately we have not yet catalogued any music published in the city I know as Istanbul, and so I defer making a choice.