Thousands of audio tracks are available online on and off campus to UST students, faculty and staff for personal and course-related listening. The databases are available thanks to four new online streaming audio databases subscribed to by UST Libraries.
Don’t think that only music faculty or individuals enrolled in a music class can use these resources. The content can be applied across a broad variety of disciplines. Smithsonian Global Sound in particular has works appropriate to history, languages, literature, cultural studies, education, theater and even the natural sciences. (Check out the sounds of snapping shrimp.)
These databases, and information about them, are available via the UST Libraries website:
- Naxos Music Library offers nearly 700,000 tracks of classical music as well as jazz, world and folk music. Added features include opera synopses and libretti, audio pronunciation guide for composer and artist names, glossary of musical terms, K-12 curricula and other music education resources, and analyses of core repertoire.
- Smithsonian Global Sound has more than 40,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word and natural and human-made sounds from Smithsonian/Folkways and other record labels. Included are readings of literary and dramatic works, historic speeches, language instruction, natural sounds, environmental and mechanical sounds, sound effects, children’s music, and traditional music from virtually everywhere in the world.
- DRAM Online focuses on American classical, modern, and avant-garde music and ensembles. A nonprofit educational organization, one of DRAM’s primary goals is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings of the work of American music composers and performers who have been neglected by the commercial marketplace. Genres represented include folk music, opera, Native American, jazz, 19th-century classical, early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and more.
- Naxos Music Library Jazz offers tens of thousands of tracks of classic and contemporary jazz, blues and R&B performed by international jazz artists.
Playlists can be created in Naxos Music Library, Smithsonian Global Sound and Naxos Music Library Jazz. Two kinds of playlists can be created: course-related playlists, which are accessible to the UST community for listening assignments and class lectures, and personal playlists, which are restricted to a single user. Refer to the Online Streaming Audio Playlists guide for more details. Note that only faculty can create institutional and course-related playlists in the Naxos databases; special passwords and instructions are required.
The databases can be searched by composer, performer or ensemble, album or track title, genre, instrument, country, language, time period and more. Other features include liner notes, composer biographies, music term glossaries, analyses of works, K-12 teaching resources, and new additions pages and RSS feeds of newly added content.
For more information about the streaming audio databases, e-mail Cathy Lutz, cataloging and music librarian, or Susan Price, reference and music librarian, or find more contact information on the Reference Desk website.
New database trials listed
Try the new databases available via the UST Libraries website; your feedback is appreciated:
- Oxford Handbooks Online contains the complete text of four subject collections of Oxford Handbooks: Business and Management (21 titles, including Business and Government and Personnel Psychology); Philosophy (26 titles, including Bioethics, Business Ethics, and Philosophy of Economics); Political Science (15 titles), and Religion (16 titles, including Bible Studies, English Literature and Theology, and Religion and American Politics). Each handbook looks at aspects of its discipline, explaining the key issues, the classic and contemporary debates on those issues, and setting the agenda for how those debates might evolve. Print or save individual essays as pdfs. The handbooks are updated with new titles three times a year. This trial runs through Saturday, Nov. 13. Send questions and comments to Marianne Hageman.
- UST Libraries has activated a trial of the PEPWeb psychology database, published by Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. This resource provides full-text archival access to psychoanalytic journals as well as to many classic texts. Although it indexes these resources to the present, it does not provide full text for the most current four (approximately) years. This trial will be active through Friday, Nov. 12. Send and questions or comments to Jan Orf.
