Alexander Street Launches
Broadest and Most Comprehensive Music Resource Available Online
New Offering Gives Library Users Powerful Way to
Access Hundreds of Thousands of Music Tracks, Scores, and Reference
Works
April 2, 2009, Alexandria, VA—Electronic
publisher Alexander Street Press today announced the launch of
Music Online, the broadest and most comprehensive resource
available for the study of classical, jazz, world, and American
music. Unique to the resource is its ability to deliver audio
recordings, video content, full-text reference materials, musical
scores, liner notes, biographies, and images through a single
interface.
The culmination of a music publishing program that began with
Alexander Street’s purchase of Classical Music Library in
2002, Music Online built on that collection’s robust
technical features and functionality by applying rich and
consistently controlled vocabularies across all format types to
achieve the powerful search capabilities Alexander Street’s
Semantic Indexing™ makes possible.
Every object in the collection is indexed for subjects, historical
events, genres, people, cultural groups, places, time periods, and
ensembles. As a result, students and scholars can combine keyword
and fielded search capabilities to frame creative and highly
targeted queries. Says Alexander Street music editor Elizabeth
Dutton, “Searching on ‘banjo,’ a user can return a bluegrass
recording by Ralph Stanley, a folk recording by Pete Seeger,
multiple images of banjos and articles on the banjo from various
reference sources, and a twentieth-century score by David Del
Tredici featuring banjo. The kind of indexing that makes this
possible involves painstaking work. It has taken years to develop
this level of cross-search functionality, and this launch represents
a significant milestone in digital reference.”
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.
By September, all of the content in both African American Music
and Smithsonian Global Sound® for Libraries will also be
cross-searchable though the new interface.
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.
“The wealth of content here is mind-boggling,” says Alexander Street
President Stephen Rhind-Tutt. “If you’re looking for a Bach cantata
to listen to while you read the score, you can do that. If you want
to read about hip hop, its origins and influences, that’s here, too.
You can access biographies of all of the great Western composers and
read the liner notes of foundational recordings while you listen to
them. Watch performances of The Nutcracker and Aida.
If you’re doing any kind of music research or study, this collection
is easily the best starting place.”
Libraries may subscribe to the entire Music Online suite of
products, or to specific subsets (all reference or all listening
collections, for example). Much of the content is also available via
outright purchase of perpetual rights. The cross-search interface is
available to any library subscribing to component collections and
will return results only for those components to which the library
subscribes.
Additional information about Music Online is available on the
Alexander Street Press Web site at
http://alexanderstreet.com/products/muso.htm
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About Alexander Street Press
Alexander Street Press is an electronic publisher of award-winning
online collections in the humanities, social sciences, performing
arts, and music. Since its beginnings in 2000, Alexander Street has
developed a reputation for uniquely powerful search capabilities
powered by Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™ and for offering
content not available anywhere else. Alexander Street collections
are available to library and educational institutions via annual
subscription or outright purchase of perpetual rights.
Free trial access is available to libraries and educational
institutions. To request trial access and pricing information, email
sales@alexanderstreet.com
