LibGuides: Music Databases: Databases

Try These First

Use the following databases and encyclopedias to find journal articles and other research materials. Sign-in required from off-campus.

Directory of Music Faculties This link opens in a new window
Database of music faculty in colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online
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Comprehensive music research of all the world's peoples. Contains the full text of the 10 volume print encyclopedia. Each volume covers a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances. Articles include photographs of musicians, musical instruments, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Also includes drawings, maps, and musical examples.
IPA Source
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IPA Source is a large collection of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcriptions and literal translations of art songs and arias originally in Latin, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. IPA Now contains over 5,700 texts, including about 1,000 aria texts.
Jazz Music Library
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Jazz Music Library provides a comprehensive streaming audio collection of jazz music, featuring thousands of jazz performers from legendary record labels. The database provides tracks from the early ‘20s to the present, covering all major jazz genres including swing, vocal jazz, bebop, blues, big band music, contemporary jazz, and more. It currently provides streaming access to more than 130,000 tracks, with new recordings added monthly. Access available to Kent and Stark campuses only.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is an electronic archive of complete journal backruns, current to within 2 to 5 years. The collections include: Arts & Sciences I-VIII, Business Collection I-III, Ecology & Botany, General Science, and Language and Literature. For Kent State University, students and faculty now have access to 381 JSTOR journals representing over 2 million articles.
Music Index Online This link opens in a new window
Index to writings on classical and popular music, including scholarly and journalistic publications and reviews of books, recordings, and performances. Covers publications from 1979 to the present. Updated quarterly. See print edition for coverage of writings from 1949 to present.
Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
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The most comprehensive collection of classical music available online. It includes 1,000,000+ tracks, including Classical music, Historical recordings, Jazz, World and Folk music. Liner notes are available for some recordings.

Oxford Music Online
Includes full-text of the the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4th ed.), Grove Music Online, the Oxford Companion to Music (2002 revision) and the Oxford Dictionary of Music (2nd ed. rev.).
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
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Includes references (most with abstracts) to scholarly writings, including books, articles, and dissertations from 1969 to the present in English and most European languages. Updated monthly.
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
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Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Access the full text for more than 4,000 scholarly publications covering diverse academic areas of study.
Areas of study include social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.

Biography and Genealogy Master Index
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Contains nearly 12 million biographical entries from over 2700 current and retrospective reference books; covers historic and contemporary figures.
Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology
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Database of citations for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, and related disciplines.

ERIC (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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ERIC is a useful database for finding educational information from lots of different sources (journals, magazines, books, conferences, and governmental agencies). It contains resources dating back to 1966 and is helpful when conducting historical research in education.

Gaylord Music Library Musician Necrology
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Lists death dates for musicians as reported in current media. Updated daily.

Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
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Humanities International Complete provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting for over 1,900 titles, and full text of hundreds of journals books and other publications. The database includes citations and abstracts for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations.
Newspaper Source This link opens in a new window
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Provides selected full text for over 180 regional U.S. newspapers, international newspapers, newswires, newspaper columns and other sources as well as indexing and abstracts for national newspapers. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are provided from CBS News, FOX News, NPR, etc. This database is updated daily.

Oxford Language Dictionaries Online
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This resource offers fully searchable comprehensive bilingual dictionaries and unique study materials that provide extra help with learning languages. Currently includes Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish bilingual dictionaries.

Oxford Reference Online - Music This link opens in a new window
Includes the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Oxford Dictionary of Music, the Concise Oxford Dictionaries of Music and Opera, the Oxford Companions to Music and Musical Theatre, and more.
Dissertations & Theses Global (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global) This link opens in a new window
Includes millions of searchable citations to dissertation and theses from around the world from 1861 to the present day together with full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and some retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works.

Web of Science Core Collection
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Provides access to three multidisciplinary databases covering selected journal literature and conference proceedings in the areas of the arts and humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Updated weekly.