What’s New at Schaffer Library

Database of the Week: Music Online

Alexander Street’s Music Online is going mobile!

What’s better than hundreds of thousands of audio recordings, videos, scores, and pages of full-text music reference? How about accessing it all on the go?

In 2010 Alexander Street’s entire music portfolio will be accessible on iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices. Subscribers will be able to stream music and video, access scores, search and navigate full-text reference content, and even access and edit personal playlists.

Alexander Street’s iPhone and iPod Touch application will be completely free. Updating your playlists or listening to an assigned recording will literally be just a touch away. And thanks to newly developed streaming technology, you’ll do it all without buffering.

Look for Alexander Street’s iPhone app in 2010 on our Web site, on this blog, and through the iTunes store.

Music Online brings together on a single cross-searchable platform the entire suite of Alexander Street Press music products that Schaffer Library subscribes to: African American Music Reference; American Song; Classical Music Library; Classical Music Reference Library; Classical Scores Library; Contemporary World Music; Jazz Music Library; Dance in Video; The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online; and Opera in Video

Exciting news for music lovers at Union. Music Online cross-search is live. As subscribers to Alexander Street’s music collections, we will soon be able to cross-search all your music listening, scores, and reference content through a single search. This change makes Music Online “the broadest and most comprehensive resource available for the study of classical, jazz, world, and American music.
It’s the only music service that delivers audio recordings, video content, full-text reference materials, musical scores, liner notes, biographies, and images through a unified interface. ”

The hundreds of thousands of cross-searchable items in Music Online include more than 88,000 tracks; 285 hours of dance and opera video; more than 13,000 scores; and more than 45,000 pages of reference content from over 150 different record and video labels, print and score publishers, including EMI, Boosey & Hawkes, Garland, Rounder Records, Rebel, Arhoolie Records, Verve, Arabesque Recordings, Smithsonian Folkways, Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, and Opus Arte.

The continuously growing collection also makes cross-searchable thousands of liner notes, biographies, and images. In May, Music Online will expand to include 20,000 jazz recordings.
Schaffer Library will be activating this feature in the next few days.
The tracks in African American Music and Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries will be added to the cross search interface around August.

A unique and central feature of the Music Online suite is its robust playlist functionality, which allows users to build playlists, incorporating content from anywhere in Music Online—or from anywhere on the Web—and then annotate them, keep them at a permanent URL for private use, or share them, either within the institution or with all subscribers. Users can, for example, build a playlist that includes multiple recordings of a single work, its score, a dance video that incorporates the work, an essay about it published elsewhere on the Web, and a biography and photograph of the composer. The collection also includes featured playlists designed to be used in conjunction with leading music textbooks and in university-level survey courses.

See Databases & Indexes–Music for the current listings available.  Stay tuned for the new search interface.