New Features and Content for USC Libraries' Music e-Resource

  • Wayne Shoaf
  • Sep 10, 2009

The USC Libraries music resource now features playlists and other new features. You can access it from the libraries' e-resources page.

Music Online allows users cross search all of the music databases published by Alexander Street Press: African American Music Reference, AmericanSong, Classical Music Library, Classical Scores Library, Contemporary WorldMusic, Dance in Video, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online, JazzMusic Library, and Opera in Video.

In its latest bulletin, Alexander Street Press shared featured playlists by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Cathy Chaparro and jazz critic Gary Giddins:

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Cathy Chaparro is the author of this month’s featured playlist, which she created in conjunction with the Pittsburgh-area annual Stephen Foster Music and Heritage Festival, “Doo Dah Days.”

“I created the playlist to go with a Web page on Stephen Foster that we had been thinking about for some time, since Stephen Foster was born in Pittsburgh, and the local neighborhood of Lawrenceville celebration is in July each year.”

Chaparro’s playlist includes 15 recordings of works by the man considered to be America’s first professional composer, as performed by a wide range of artists, including Angelina Baker, Wayne Erbsen, and Pete Seeger. Recordings in the playlist include “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Swanee River,” as well as Chaparro’s current favorite, “Nelly Bly,”—“because,” says Chaparro, “it’s such a lively tune, and I like the journalist who was given that pen name after the Foster tune.”

And check out the Gary Giddins playlist, with links to all things Gary Giddins.

The publisher also gave a running list of its most recently updated features and content:

Just a reminder that Alexander Street’s continuously growing music listening and reference collections are now cross-searchable*, delivering audio recordings, video content, full-text reference materials, musical scores, liner notes, biographies, and images through a single interface.
 
*Smithsonian Global Sound is the only Alexander Street music collection not yet cross-searchable via the Music Online interface; it will be added to the cross-search platform by October of 2009.
 
Alexander Street’s Music Online currently includes:

  • 13,876 CDs
  • 202,738 recordings
  • 14,824 scores
  • 53,119 pages of full-text reference
  • 297 videos totaling 468 hours
  • And hundreds to thousands of new recordings, scores, and pages of full-text reference are added every month. 

We’re continuously adding new content to Music Online collections. To see a complete listing of all new content added in the past month, visit the Music Online cross-search interface and click on the “What’s New” tab at https://muco.alexanderstreet.com/WhatsNew. Or consult the “What’s New” tab on any one of our individual music and performing arts collections.
 
Here’s what’s new since our last update:

  • New Playlist Functionality. We’ve just upgraded the playlist functionality for all Alexander Street music and video collections. Enhancements include:
    • Expanded user profile options include the ability to add photos, citations, and links to outside publications, contact and course information for faculty, and many other personal and social media details. Simply log in and select “my profile” to update.
    • Automatic log-in. Once you log in to any Alexander Street collection, you will be recognized and logged in automatically to any other Alexander Street collection during the same browser session.
    • New playlist browse and search options let you resort on any column and search all playlists by title, annotation, and author. If you make your playlist public, your name name is hyperlinked to your profile page so that all of your playlists are easy to find. This makes it easy for others to “shop” for and repurpose existing playlists.
    • Featured playlists now appear on the home page of every streaming collection and are frequently updated.
    • Browse clips. Expanded browse options let you identify clips (as opposed to complete videos).
  • Classical Music Library just grew by more than 2,500 new composer biographies. We've also added some new functionality enhancements, including:
    • New “browse by composer” options let you navigate directly to all of the works by each composer (see Works list below)—and to multiple performances of each work—from the same screen, reducing the number of clicks it takes to access this information.
    • Each composer page links directly to the complete list of works for that composer and to the complete list of recordings of each work. Both links appear above the biography section on each composer page.
    • And finally, we’ve been listening to you!  After we upgraded Classical Music Library to the new interface, a number of you let us know that a few of your favorite features had changed slightly. We’ve gone back and updated the new interface to incorporate those things you told us you missed. You can now, for example, start listening to any performance directly from your browse or search results page, reducing the number of clicks it takes to navigate the collection. You can also now add recordings to playlists directly from the browse pages.
  • The largest available online collection of licensed scores, Classical Scores Library grew by 918 works totaling 47,488 pages. New scores from Faber and contemporary music publisher Universal Edition include works by Joseph Achron, Richard Rodney Bennett, Alban Berg, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Anne Boyd, Anton Bruckner, Frederick Delius, Morton Feldman, Leos Janacek, Gustav Mahler, Frank Martin, Claudio Monteverdi, Arvo Pärt, Max Reger, Wolfgang Rihm, Steve Reich, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and more. The collection now includes a total of 13,558 scores totaling 277,028 pages.

Classical Scores Library also includes new technical features, including a faster-loading image viewer that makes it easier to access long scores, regardless of your bandwidth. The new image viewer lets you view individual pages of a score without having to wait for the full PDF to load, and ultimately delivers a smoother and faster experience for all users. Other enhancements include thumbnail images that let you see and scroll through multiple pages without having to open the score; and new printing options let you print an entire score, just a movement, or a range of pages you select. All of these enhanced features are also included within the new Music Online cross-search interface.

  • We’ve re-launched American Song!  With this release, American Song has more than tripled in size, making it the only comprehensive, continuously growing, online resource to cover the entire history of American music—from colonial songs, American Indian music, and slave spirituals to folk music, jazz, and modern day forms such as reggae and hip-hop. New artists include Ray Charles, James Brown, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Booker T & The MGs, The Shirelles, Jackson Browne, The Kingston Trio, and many others.

Responding to feedback from a number of libraries and users, we started by integrating the more than 17,000 recordings that were previously part of African American Song.  Separately, we’ve added more than 35,000 new recordings to the collection. In the last month alone, we’ve added 1,273 albums. American Song now contains 3,275 albums totaling 57,465 recordings—and it’s all cross-searchable through Music Online.

  • The largest online collection of streaming jazz licensed from the leading jazz record labels, Jazz Music Library grew by 583 albums and 7,577 tracks to a new total of 2,549 CDs and 26,599 tracks.  New works have been licensed from Audiophile, Concord Records, Contemporary Records, Jazzology Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, and Prestige Records. New material includes recordings from Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Karrin Allyson, Benny Carter, Eric Dolphy, Etta Jones, Louie Bellson, Milt Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Zoot Sims, and more.
  • The only online collection of streaming video for the enjoyment and teaching of dance performance, Dance in Video grew by 39 new titles to a total of 189 videos totaling 140 hours.  New titles added to the collection include videos from the Alive and Kicking Series; performances by the Cullberg Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theater, Li Chiao-Ping, the American Dance Festival Repertory Company, the National Ballet of Canada, Kaeja d’Dance Company, Pennsylvania Dance Theatre, the Dutch National Ballet, and the American Dance Festival Repertory Company; interviews with Trisha Brown, Wu Jing Shu, Honi Coles, Ethel Butler, Molissa Fenley, and members of the Exit Dance Theatre; and documentaries on ballroom dancing, the dance art of Thailand, the Royal Academy of Dancing, and the restaging of “State of Darkness” with Molissa Fenley and Peter Boal.
  • Opera in Video grew by 45 new operas to a new total of 108 video titles totaling 328 hours. New titles from Opus Arte and the Bel Canto Society include operas from composers Albeniz (Merlin, 2003 Madrid); Bernstein (Trouble in Tahiti, 2001, London); Bizet (Carmen, 2007 Covent Garden), 1946 and 1954 films of Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore; 1955 film of Giordano’s Andrea Chenier with Mario Del Monaco; Gounod (Romeo et Juliette, 1994 Covent Garden); Monteverdi (L’Orfeo, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda); Mussorgsky (Khovanshchina, 2007 Liceu); Rameau (Les Boréades, Les Indes galantes, Castor et Pollux); Wagner (Das Rheingold, Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung).
  • African American Music Reference, the only comprehensive online resource on the history of black American musical expression, grew by 11 reference sources totaling 5,103 pages, taking the total count up to 26,764 pages.  For a complete bibliography of titles, email marketing@alexanderstreet.com New titles added, include:
    • Jazz from the Beginning, by Garvin Bushell and Mark Tucker (Da Capo Press, 1998).
    • Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap, by Eithne Quinn (Columbia University Press, 2005).
    • Ella Fitzgerald: The Complete Biography, by Stuart Nicholson (Routledge, 2004).
    • Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement, by S. Craig Watkins (Beacon Press, 2005).
    • Two books by Douglas Henry Daniels: One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable Story of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Beacon Press, 2005) and Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young (Beacon Press, 2002).
    • The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz, by Gerald Majer (Columbia University Press, 2005).
    • The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, by Shane White and Graham White (Beacon Press, 2005).
    • Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Gayle F. Wald (Beacon Press, 2007).
    • Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, by Suzanne E. Smith (Harvard University Press, 1999).
    • A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and the American Popular Song, by Jeffrey Melnick (Harvard University Press, 1999).
  • Delivering the sounds of all regions from every continent, Contemporary World Music grew by 304 albums and 3,251 recordings since the last update to a total count of 1,750 albums, totaling 23,235 tracks. New content includes albums licensed from Appleseed Recordings, Black Sun Records, Buda Musique, Celestial Harmonies, Fortuna Records, Piranha Records, and World Music Network. New music includes afro-pop, ambient, chant, contemporary Celtic and British folk music, electronic, jazz fusion, new age, ska, and more.