This is a mammoth e-book, reproducing all five thick volumes, 1.25 million words, 500 images, and 1,800 musical examples from the updated paperback edition. It is, however, an e-book and not a database, and so you won’t find it on the library website’s databases A to Z page. Instead, I would recommend searching the catalog for it (note that as of this time, the record might be getting processed) or navigating to the Music Library Guide and looking at the “Books” tab, under “E-reference”.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to offer them below.

What seems to be even more of a coup to my mind is the addition of Blue Note to the Naxos Music Library Jazz. That’s particularly impressive, because our access to this service has been sort of ancillary, to be honest–basically, we have a nice package deal.

The Blue Note label has always been noticeably absent from Naxos Jazz as well as the Alexander Street Jazz Music Library. Not anymore. Between the two services, I think the UNR Libraries currently provide access to a very well rounded collection of streamable jazz, so for me, personally, I’m excited about that, and I hope you all are, too.

It just goes to show you that I should come out from under my rock from time to time.

Sometimes, as a librarian, I have the opposite problem from some of our users: rather than simply starting with a search of the Web, I begin by searching the library’s collection…and then when I can’t find it, I shrug my shoulders and say, “Ah well, I guess there’s nothing to do about it until I can get something purchased.”

Case in point, an inquiry I had today from a customer who was looking for piano sheet music with Italian lyrics for the “Casta Diva” aria in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma. As it turns out, the Knowledge Center’s copy has gone missing. That stymied me, and I really thought this customer was out of luck.

Thankfully, I discovered a PDF scan of the vocal score on the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library, which is a Wiki that collects links to public domain scores that are available freely online.

I’m going to get a link to this up on our undernourished list of Music Resources on the Web, as well. And on that note, I would welcome any other World Wide Web sites you’d care to see on said page.

We have just added 8 new videos from the Balanchine Foundation and the Royal Ballet to Dance in Video.

New material includes coaching sessions and interviews with Alicia Alonso, Arthur Mitchell, Maria Tallchief, Melissa Hayden and Todd Bolender, along with performances of Ondine, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake with the Royal Ballet.

Dance in Video now includes 286 videos, equalling 239 hours.

Enjoy. And if you have any thoughts about the Dance in Video database, feel free to share them here.

I recently placed an order for a long list of CDs to be added to our multimedia collection. This order is actually in support of a Music course here at UNR. So in other words, these items weren’t ordered merely because they’re good albums (though they are), but rather because they’re also important in the long view of popular music history. The list of albums follows:

• Robert E. Lee Remembered – Douglas Jimerson
• After the Ball – Morris Bolcolm
• Embraceable You – Nat King Cole
• Sinatra at the Sands – Frank Sinatra
• Complete Recordings – Robert Johnson
• The Tiffany Transcriptions – Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
• 20 of Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits – Hank Williams Sr.
• Let the Good Times Roll – Louis Jordan
• Ray Charles – Ray Charles
• 20 Greatest Hits – The Platters
• His Best 1 – Chuck Berry
• Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys
• Surfin’ Safari / Surfin’ USA – The Beach Boys
• Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – Bob Dylan
• A Hard Day’s Night – The Beatles
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – The Beatles
• 20 All-Time Greatest Hits! – James Brown
• The Doors – The Doors
• Surrealistic Pillow – Jefferson Airplane
• Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock – Jimi Hendrix
• What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
• Tapestry – Carole King
• Hotel California – Eagles
• Bruce Springsteen – Greatest Hits - Bruce Sprinsteen
• The Best of the Village People – The Village People
• Rocket to Russia – Ramones
• Never Mind the Bollocks – Sex Pistols
• Talking Heads ’77 – Talking Heads
• After the Gold Rush – Neil Young
• Second Helping – Lynyrd Skynyrd
• 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs – Dolly Parton
• Woman in Me – Shania Twain
• Thriller – Michael Jackson
• Like a Virgin – Madonna
• Very Best of – Prince
• Graceland – Paul Simon
• Fear of a Black Planet – Public Enemy
• Everything is Possible: The Very Best of – Living Colour
• Nevermind – Nirvana
• Mellow Gold – Beck
• The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – Lauryn Hill

You should see them start trickling into the multimedia collection sometime soon. Keep your eye on the catalog.

If you feel that I’ve removed or left off an important database, I’m all ears. And on a related note, the list of selected web resources may be a remnant from another time. Just the same, I think I will elect to retain it, though it needs a significant revamp. If you’ve got web sites that you use for conducting your research, please share.

As always, you can drop a comment on this post, or contact me through some other means.

As someone familiar with Alexander Street music collections, we wanted to be sure you know about a new blog we’re sponsoring—a blog that will help you with collection development of music materials during a time of enormous change in the music publishing industry and a blog that music faculty will love for its focus on teaching materials.

Music Media Monthly reviews the latest and most important music content—regardless of format. CDs, videos, books, e-books, scores, Web sites, downloads, and streams—whatever form the newest and most important music content takes, our blog editors are covering it!

The blog is led by Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. He is also the founder and editor of CD HotList: New Releases for Libraries, and the former editor of the “Sound Recording Reviews” column for Notes, the quarterly journal of the Music Library Association. Anderson will write Music Media Monthly’s introductory note for each issue, as well as the Recordings column, which will cover significant new releases and reissues (both CDs and downloads), along with recommendations for related backlist titles.
Co-bloggers on the site include composer, music columnist, and critic Steve Dankner, who will head up the site’s Books column, which will cover significant and upcoming music-related titles, reprints, and new editions from both leading trade publishers and scholarly presses. Anne Shelley, an assistant librarian at the University of Minnesota and the editor of the Digital Media Reviews column for Notes, will write the Videos column for Music Media Monthly, focusing on new releases as well as remasterings, reissues, and old titles being released in new formats. Veteran music writer Gene Hyde, who also writes for CD Hotlist and was previously curator of the John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection at Lyon College, will head up the Web Sites column, looking at important new Web resources as well as lesser known sites that deserve to be more widely read. He will also identify sites with interesting free streaming, sample, or download offerings and cover news about changes or important new content on existing music Web sites.

Take a look now at http://musicmediamonthly.com!

If you’re counting, that makes two streaming jazz products to which we subscribe; the other is the Naxos Music Library Jazz. You may be asking yourself why we need two streaming jazz products. Well, jazz isn’t particularly the specialty of Naxos– for most intents and purposes, we’re barely paying for it, since it’s bundled with the larger Naxos Music product–so they’re lacking some of the music labels you might expect to find, like Concord, Riverside, or Verve. In that respect, Alexander Street does a better job of capturing what feels like a more complete collection of recordings.

Nothing’s perfect, unfortunately, so you still aren’t getting, for example, a lot of Miles Davis, owing to the salient absence of Sony. Also gone missing is Blue Note. But overall, they provide a reasonably solid product.

Here are the details from the “About” page:

Jazz Music Library will be the largest and most comprehensive collection of jazz available online—with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres. At launch, the collection includes works licensed from legendary record labels, including Audiophile, Concord Jazz, Contemporary Records, Fantasy, Jazzology, Milestone, Nessa Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, and Prestige. Labels being added include Circle Records, GHB Records, Good Time Jazz, GRP Records, Impulse, Peak, Riverside, Solo Art Records, Stretch Records, Verve, and dozens more. Note that not all labels are available in all territories.

The list of artists is enormous, ranging from past greats to musicians performing and recording today, including: Abbey Lincoln, Andre Previn, Art Farmer, Benny Carter, Bill Evans, Billy Strayhorn, Bix Beiderbecke, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie ByrdCharlie Parker, Chet Baker, Chuck Mangione, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Dizzie Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Eric Dolphy, Gerry Mulligan, Grover Washington, Jr., John Coltrane, Karrin Allyson, Lester Young, Marian McPartland, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Ramsey Lewis, Rosemary Clooney, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Tony Bennett, Wes Montgomery, Zoot Sims, and a long list of others. Liner notes to all the albums are included (in PDF format) as well as static URLs to each track and album in the database. Content is added on a regular basis, and exciting new materials will be highlighted on the home page, so please check back regularly for updates. We aim to release new content monthly, and we are focusing on releasing a large number of albums as possible for each release. Once the albums are released, we then add in additional indexing for each album, including detailed instrumentation and performer information.

If you have any questions about using this product, feel free to ask. One thing I’ll point out now is the “Playlists” link at the top, which is a nice way of creating an annotated list of tracks, which you can then make available to your class or to the entire university (example).

That said, I had a question last night about dead musicians, and why we tend to romanticize them. Whether this has something to do with some sort of shared macabre obsession with death in popular society.

This is, to be sure, something of a tricky topic on which to get started, and I won’t go very in depth here, because I judge that the chance of this student ever reading this is fairly low. But just in case, here are a few ideas:

The Knowledge Center has a book called Rock over the edge : transformations in popular music culture. There is a chapter in there called “Mourning becomes…? Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and the ‘waning of affect’”. Here’s the abstract from RILM Abstracts:

While modern 1960s rock icons are mourned through cinematic visual documents, Kurt Cobain’s existence has been prolonged through music videos and posthumous releases by Nirvana. The significance of Cobain’s death depends on the functioning of the new music cultural apparatus (principally television) and the general cultural apparatus of postmodernism. Television images in contemporary times effectively abolish the need for mourning dead rock performers. The Tupac Shakur video ‘Changes’, however, employs photographic stills that underscore mourning instead of abolishing it, suggesting another affect-set that reconciles mass mediation and mourning.

Here’s an article I uncovered through Sociological Abstracts–it’s not specifically about musicians, but rather discusses a growing infatuation with matters of death and corpses. There is a subsection in here about celebrity corpses, and another section about James Brown, specifically. In any event, it might be worth looking at to support the a theoretical foundation for the essay.

Foltyn, J. (2008). Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture, forensics, and the rise of the corpse. Mortality, 13(2), 153-173. doi:10.1080/13576270801954468.

Here’s something else that’s a little bit more on point.

Plopper, B., & Ness, M. (1993). Death as portrayed to adolescents through top 40 rock and roll music. Adolescence, 28(112), 793. Retrieved from Professional Development Collection database.

I hope that’s enough to get started. This might prove to be a difficult thesis to support, but I recommend spending some time with the RILM Abstracts, Music Index, JSTOR, and probably a much broader database like Academic Search Premier.