Bumper Crop of E-Resources Free to our Performing Artists

There's a really good selection of digital resources on the Whittaker Library website these days.  Here's our pick of the crop:-

Audio streamed sound and the Alexander Street Press collection

There's a huge range of materials available through the Alexander Street Press MOP (Music Online Premium) collection, and there's more to Naxos than you realised!

Databases for musical topics, essays and research: JSTOR, RILM and Oxford Music

We subscribe to the JSTOR music package: full-text articles from any of the journals in that package, once they've been published for about 3 years.  JSTOR is on our E-resources page.  Click on JSTOR Music Collection to see list of titles.

 

HOW TO FIND MATERIAL IN JSTOR

Clicking on Browse is useful for an overview, or click Search for something specific.  The Advanced Search is great for refining your search.  You can link terms with "And", give alternative terms with "Or", or exclude terms using "Not".  (Eg, you might search for Sibelius AND computer software, or if you're looking for the composer, search Sibelius NOT computer software!)

You can also choose where your search-terms will appear:-

• If you select ‘abstract’, that means the words will be in the summary and have a better chance of being relevant.    
•  Or you can say that the words must be in the title.  Different results – it’s very precise search but might find articles that don’t have an abstract.

You can search for all kinds of topics – not just particular composers, but maybe something like reflective practice.  

If you’re looking for full-text articles, you need to select “Content I can access”.  If you’ve got an interdisciplinary query, then it might still be worth doing a wider search. (Our readers can ask the library to try to obtain articles from other journals that we don’t subscribe to.)

• Here’s something else useful - My JSTOR is a way of storing articles that you’ve found, so you can come back to them later.   
• And there’s a “shelf” facility where you keep the articles you’re actively reading on your “shelf” for a couple of weeks.  This is over and above the facility to keep citations.  More about My Shelf here:- http://about.jstor.org/rr

View the JSTOR presentation about the database HERE.

RILM - music abstracts

There are big differences between JSTOR and RILM:-  

• JSTOR is full-text.  We subscribe to the music package, and you’ll find anything but the most recent issues of the journals listed.  You can also look to see what's been written if you're interested in an interdisciplinary topic.
• RILM is just for musical topics.  It’s an index to the abstracts of journal articles – you get summaries, but you don’t generally get the articles themselves.  (Although RILM says linked full-text is available, this doesn’t mean that we subscribe to the e-journal, so the full-texts links don’t always work!)  If we don’t have the articles in stock, we can try to obtain them for you.  Undergraduates usually find what they need in our own collection until they get to extended projects or dissertations.
• Advanced Search works much better than Simple Search.  You get more results!
• RILM is collaborative – core journals are indexed but you can also add your own articles if they haven’t come up via the RILM indexers. This gets them “out there” where people can find them.

OXFORD MUSIC is also known as Grove Music.  The database builds on what was originally Grove Dictionary of Music, but also includes Oxford Dictionary of Music and Oxford Companion to Music.  This means you can choose the amount of info you need.

• Useful bibliographies.
• Facility to print out articles.
• There's a gadget to produce correctly formatted citations (publication details) for essays and articles.
• Note the Highlight on/off, Print, Email and Cite buttons at the top of the article.  

STREAMED MUSIC - We demonstrated what Alexander Street Press playlists can do for you!

DRAMA RESOURCES 

The Learning and Teaching conference session embraced the main subscription databases that are subscribed to via the Whittaker library, including:

 

• Digital Theatre Plus -A growing collection of recorded performance of drama, opera & dance with educational background materials. 
• Dance in Video - 500 hours of dance, covering ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, & improvisational dance. 
• Drama Online - An online library of 1000+ plays 100+ scholarly works 
• BUFVC (British Universities Film and Video Council) -A database that can help find previously broadcast TV & Radio programmes. 
• Stan Winston School of Character Arts -Online training website with the world's finest FX Artists and technicians.

These are only some of our online databases.  We're also thinking about the changing digital expectations of students and how best to address these expectations by using Electronic Resources in your teaching and lesson plans.