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Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press has launched Music Online, a resource for the study of classical, jazz, world, and American music. Music Online is able 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 programme that began with Alexander Street's purchase of Classical Music Library in 2002, Music Online built on that collection's technical features and functionality by applying vocabularies across all format types. Every object in the collection is indexed for subjects, historical events, genres, people, cultural groups, places, time periods, and ensembles. As a result, users can combine keyword and fielded search capabilities to frame targeted queries.
Alexander Street music editor, Elizabeth Dutton, said, "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 crosssearch functionality, and this launch represents a significant milestone in digital reference."
The 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 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 feature of the Music Online suite is its 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.
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