Online Resources

The Roud Folk Song Index

SteveRoud_180The Roud Folksong Index is Steve Roud’s monumental labor of love, now supported and hosted by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in London. It guides users to published and manuscript folk song scores, texts, and recordings. By searching the index, researchers can use the provided information to find the music and/or text of folk songs in a library collection.

The index now includes over 191,000 references to songs that have been collected from oral tradition in the English language. Its database, searchable by one or multiple fields, includes fields for song title, tune name, first line of text, source type (broadside, book, etc.), source reference, bibliography reference ID (with a link to complete bibliographic information), previous source, performer, place collected, date collected, collector, contents (text and/or music, number of verses), date added, Roud number, other number, subjects, broadside printer, broadside location, notes and Roud ID number.

Probably the largest English-language folk song index in the world to date, this online source is indispensable for those searching for written or recorded versions of traditional songs from the English-speaking world. It is freely available on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website.

The Beethoven Gateway

The Beethoven Gateway is a free online resource that helps direct people interested in Beethoven to books, articles, scores, and other sources on the composer. Although it functions primarily as a catalog of the collections of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, its also serves the broader purpose of providing a comprehensive and fully-indexed bibliography of materials relating to Beethoven, from a wide range of subject areas.

The principle aims of the database are:

  1. bring together bibliographical information of all significant Beethoven materials dating from the late eighteenth century to the present through the creation of a dedicated database;
  2. improve access to information on Beethoven by providing in-depth subject analysis of the literature from all fields and abstracts or content notes;
  3. create ease of access to bibliographic information by adding indexes of works, genres, and other desirable access points;
  4. create, maintain, and disseminate a thesaurus of terms and guidelines for using the database;
  5. provide information on locations of primary research materials through the thesaurus and the database itself;
  6. make the database freely available worldwide on the Internet.

The database does not yet provide full text of articles or books, although links from Beethoven Gateway to full text databases is planned. Links to scanned images from the Center are also forthcoming. (from the website)

The digital collection of Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri”

The digital collection of Music Library of Greece ‘Lilian Voudouri’
includes more than 330,000 digitized documents of unique cultural value on
Greek music and is a source for every researcher interested in Greek music.
These items can be utilized for the interdisciplinary creation of cultural
services, always subject to intellectual property law.
The digital collection includes the archives of the composers Mikis
Theodorakis, Emilios Riadis, Georgios Poniridis, Frank Choisy, the archive
of Nileus Kamarados-Nikolaos Vlachopoulos, as well as a part of the
Manuscript and Greek Songs Collections that belong to the Library. The
collection has recently been enriched by the archive of Dimitrios Lialios,
the collections of concert programmes and other cultural events, Greek
musical periodicals, books of Byzantine music and vinyl records.
Certain categories of documents are not available online; i.e. items related
to public organizations, corporations and personal documents. All material
that integrates in the above-mentioned categories is accessible only within
the Library premises.”

Bavarian State Library Launches a Major Digital Scores Project

In November 2011 the German Research Foundation of the Bavarian State Library approved funding for the first stage of a four-year digitization project. The Bavarian State Library owns about 1,800 music prints dating from the 16th and 17 centuries, including polyphonic vocal and instrumental music. The project will create one of the world’s richest collections of the most popular pieces from the beginnings of music printing. The materials to be scanned are listed in the bibliographies of collected prints RISM BI, 1 and individual prints RISM AI. Printed music of the 16th and 17 centuries was usually presented as “Stimmbücher” or several different works (up to 20 different prints) in the form of an anthology. They are often bound in fragile historic bindings, including many with parchment covers.

The first phase of the project (February 2012 to 2014) will digitize approximately 1,050 titles.

(Adapted from ViFaMusik-Blog)

New eBook records

In partnership with Internet Archive, the Harold B. Lee Library Music & Dance Department has recently scanned 75 titles pre-dating 1923 in its reference collection.  Some titles are entirely new to the Internet Archive collections while others supplement scanning gaps in multi-volume works.  This scanning effort consists primarily of dictionaries and music histories.  We have updated the corresponding records in our online bibliography with Internet Archive URLs to reflect this development. These records can be found in our database by searching by “eBook” publication type.  A complete list of titles can be found after the cut. …