The Music Treasures Consortium proudly announces a new Web site giving access to some of the world’s most valued music manuscript and print materials, available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/treasures/treasures-home.html.
The site is the creation of several renowned music libraries and archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. The consortium members include the British Library, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, the Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace Library, the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the New York Public Library. The site is hosted by the Library of Congress on its Performing Arts Encyclopedia (www.loc.gov/performingarts). The aim of the site is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for performance and study of music.

The items digitized include manuscript scores and first and early editions of a work. Seminal composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, among others, are represented on the site through their original handwritten manuscripts and first editions. The online items range from the 16th century to the 20th century in this initial launch. Researchers can search or browse materials, access bibliographic information about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive’s Web site. The site will continue to grow as consortium members add more items.

Initial planning for the consortium was funded by Bruce Kovner. The MTC Advisory Board includes Christoph Wolff, Jeffrey Kallberg, Philip Gossett, and Laurent Pugin.

Music Treasures Consortium Members:

The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/

Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/loebmusic/

The Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace Library
http://www.juilliard.edu/libraryarchives/general.html

The Library of Congress (host)
http://www.loc.gov/

The Morgan Library and Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/

The New York Public Library
http://www.nypl.org/

From a posting by Karen Lund to MLA-L

The HathiTrust is a digital library that pulls together digitized publications from its partner institutions, Google Books, and the Internet Archive.

All materials in the Hathi Trust Digital Library are fully searchable but you can only view full text of items in the public domain.

The collections feature allows you to browse within collections created by other users.

Once you’ve selected a collection to browse, it will look like this:

The HathiTrust Digital Library has tens of thousands of items related to music, theatre and dance, so go check out their newly redesigned website and see what you can find for your next big project or just for fun!

Are you getting the most out of Oxford Music Online? Sure, you know you can keyword search all of New Grove, Grove Opera, and Grove Jazz, but did you know that there are search options that can help you work smarter, not harder?

Do you get search results that look like this? In this example I was looking for an entry about “practicing”. Since I didn’t know if I would find it under “practice” or “practicing”, I tried a basic keyword search using “practic*”, which searches for anything that starts with “practic”.

That’s way too many results to look through, and I don’t see what I want at the top of the results.* (Kind of reminds you of Google, huh?)

There has to be a better way to do a search for such a popular term. Luckily, from the main Oxford Music Online page you have several options to narrow your search.

Across the top you can see that you have the option to narrow your search by type of thing you are looking for (a person? a thing/subject? Or do you want to do a basic keyword search, but maybe only in Grove?

Or, you can choose which resource you want to search in or choose an advanced search.

If you choose to do an advanced search, you really start to have options to narrow your search.

> You can choose to search in certain sections of entries (biography, bibliography, etc)
> You can choose to search in certain types of entries in each resource. Choose Grove and then select which subset of entries (People, places, terminology, etc)
> And, you can choose to limit your search to the title of an entry, the full text of the entry, the bibliography, or the works list, or the contributors.

Don’t forget to use the help tips Oxford provides!

If you want to just search and/or browse the subject entries in a particular resource, click on the “Subject Entries” link at the top of the page.

Now that I know all of this, I can try a smarter search for the concept of “practicing.” I’m still going to use “practic*” but am going to limit myself to the category of “Musical terminology and concepts” and limit my search to entry titles.

When I do this I get just two results, and the one I want is second. I never would have thought to look under “Psychology of Music” for this!

*Ok, so the entry I wanted is about 15th in the list–so not so bad, but sometimes the thing you want can be even further down the list.

You might have noticed that the library’s online catalog has a new look.

You can now search both the U of I Library Catalog and the IShare Catalog with a user interface called VuFind. You can still search the local U of I Catalog through either the VuFind interface or the Classic interface. However, the IShare Catalog has been completely replaced with VuFind.

Here are a few things you should know to make VuFind easier to use.

1. In the basic search screen, “AND” is assumed, so if you want to combine multiple concepts, just type them all in the field. If you want to use NOT or OR, you have to use the Advanced Search screen and use the dropdowns.

If you have a phrase you want to keep together, use quotation marks, e.g., “folk singing”.

2. If you want to search for various forms of a word, use * as the truncation symbol, e.g., symphon* will find symphony and symphonies.

3. To limit by item format, you must use the advanced search feature.

You can still use the word “digital” in your search to help limit to CDs or DVDs, although this is not perfect.

4. On the results screen you will have more options to limit your search. Use the “topics” like you would use LC Subject Headings to determine what an item is about.

5. To see the full contents of an item, you must look at either the “More details” tab, or if there is one, the “Table of Contents” tab.

5. In order to place a request for an item through IShare, you must create a user account in VuFind. Click on the “Login” link at the top right of the screen and then click on “Create a new account.”

Placing a request through IShare…you must repeat your search for the item and select “All IShare Libraries” from the drop-down next to the search box. Once you find the item you want, click on the “Request this item” link at the bottom of the location information for a particular library.

6. Features currently unavailable in VuFind:

* Course reserves searching
* Call number searching
* Ability to limit items by library
* Direct export of records to Refworks

**Note: If you are in the old catalog and you click the link to “Find copies in other iShare libraries” it will take you to the LOCAL catalog in VUFind. You then need to select “All iShare Libraries” from the dropdown and repeat the search.