Classical Music Reference Library (review)

Launched in 2007, Alexander Street Press (ASP)'s Classical Music Reference Library (hereafter CMRL) contains 28,504 essays and images from thirty-nine sources as of 11 May 2011. A reference text complement to ASP's online audio, video, and score databases, CMRL covers all classical genres, with an emphasis on biographies. The majority of the CMRL content is academic research level, with a few juvenile works. Three standard reference works—Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Baker's Dictionary of Music, and Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music—form the core of CMRL, as reflected in the domain name. The other substantial reference sets are Women Composers: Music through the Ages, volumes 1 through 8, and Music Since 1900, 6^th edition. Other content includes ten books from the Princeton University Press ". . . and His World" series, a few books from several university presses and Greenwood Press, and liner notes from recordings that are found in ASP's Classical Music Library.

The layout of CMRL will be familiar to users of other ASP resources such as Classical Music Library, Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and Dance in Video. The CMRL and the other ASP music databases are searchable through the Music Online portal at http://muco.alexanderstreetpress .com. This review will focus specifically on the CMRL interface. A basic search box near the top right will satisfy the typical user. According to the Search Tips on the "Help" page, this basic search box defaults to an "OR" search. Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT may be used. Word order is disregarded, but quotation marks can be used to specify phrase searches, although this is not mentioned in the online Help. The search term is highlighted in the results in red font. This highlighting feature functions most effectively with single search terms, or words that appear as a phrase, such as "basso continuo" or "transverse flute." Entering multiple terms in the basic search box brings up results containing all the terms, but only the first is highlighted in red. Multiple-word searches without the use of quotation marks or Boolean operators bring up relevancy-ranked results, starting with those containing the exact phrase or all the terms, and ending with instances of a single term.

Currently, the "Advanced Search" screen offers a text search box and a title search box. The title search box searches the monograph titles, titles of sound recordings with liner notes, and entry titles in the Baker's sets. This is a convenient way to bring up only the main Baker's entries for a person, along with any of the e-books or CD liner notes where the name is in the title. Interestingly, a title field search also retrieves some images and illustrations, depending on how these were indexed. Illustrations in the Deems Taylor, Ernst von Dohnányi, Purcell, and Schumann biographies appear both within the text and in a separate section after the back matter. A title field search retrieves results from these individually indexed images at the back. Images from other books, such as The History of Classical Music and The Instruments of Music by Stuart Kallen, appear only within the text and do not come up by a title search. (Illustrations from the Princeton University Press books are omitted entirely.) Search results are presented in relevancy rank, with the option to resort by title. Additional fields for author, publisher, date range, and subjects appear on the "Advanced Search" screen in gray, with the note that they will be available in a future release. Elizabeth Brown Dutton, Editorial Director at ASP, indicates the 2012 schedule of updates is not yet finalized.

The results appear with a material type icon to the...