Music 511: Foundations and Methods of Musicology I  Tags: music musicology research_methods  

A few tips regarding the library catalog.

1. Know your limits. Search limits that is--limit by format (score, recording, film, language, date, etc. These are "sticky"--once you set them they persist until you clear them.

2. Boolean and advanced search. These are your friends. Use quotation marks around phrases and join synonyms with parentheses.

Example: "Brahms and viola and sonat?" or maybe

3. Pluralize, pluralize. Uniform titles and subject headings usually use the plural form of a word--symphonies, scores, settings, etc. You can also approach this with truncation. Don't know whether the score you are looking for contains one symphony, two sinfonia, or three symphonien? Use symphon? instead. Same for sonat? and quartet?, etc.

4. Subject headings. Follow the yellow brick road. Or, click and you shall find. After you've done a keyword search as above, you can scan the results for items that look promising. Check the subject headings in those records and click on them to find more items with the same headings.

Examples of headings that you might encounter in your research:

• Berg, Alban, 1885-1935--Criticism and interpretation.
• Operas--Analysis, appreciation.
• Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883--Influence.

Subject headings tell you what an item is about. This is especially helpful if you want to narrow your results to items about a composer and not items by the composer. You can search directly on subject headings, which is best done in an advanced search.