Part I

Finding Music in the Music Library: Getting Started

Usually music is found most easily in the catalog by searching for the author (that is, the composer) of the piece and then using the "Locate in results" command to jump to the uniform title for the piece. Why is this? And what is a uniform title? Read on...

Suppose you want to find a score or recording of Britten's opera "Peter Grimes." Looking at the main menu of the library's catalog, start your search by looking for "Britten, Benjamin" as an author. Here is your result:

Notice that you retrieve a long numeric/alphabetical list of all scores and recordings that have Benjamin Britten as an author. If you scroll to the bottom of the screen, you will see a gray box labeled "Locate in Results" with a number in a box beside it. To go to the "Peter Grimes" entries, delete the number and insert "Peter Grimes." When you submit your search, the computer will take you to the place in your alphabetical list where the entries for Peter Grimes begin. Here is the result:

So far, so good. Now suppose that you'd like to find a score or recording of the symphony by Haydn known as the Surprise Symphony. Again, you search for "Haydn, Joseph" as an author. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and locate in the results "Surprise symphony." Notice that this time you get a message saying:

If you click on the "See" reference, also known as a cross reference, you will be shown all items that include the Surprise symphony.

Why does there need to be a different title for the Surprise symphony? In the following sections you will learn the reasons for the necessity of uniform titles, such as this, and how they are constructed. There are different kinds of uniform titles, and many aspects to them. It may seem that there is a great deal to learn just to find a piece of music, but having the ability to search for music by uniform title will, in the long run, save you time and, for most types of music, produce more and better results than any other method.

If you are tempted to use another method to search for music in the catalog, read on:

Title search: Searching "Surprise symphony" as a title retrieves, at this writing, less than a third of the sound recordings available. Luckily it also retrieves a cross reference that will take you to a more complete listing of the works. This will not always happen. What is more likely is that you will retrieve a few, but not all, of the scores and recordings of a particular work.

Author/title search: Our catalog gives you the option of doing an author/title search at the same time. If you do a search using "Haydn, Joseph" as author and "Surprise symphony" as title, you get a little longer list of scores and sound recordings. This is a better, but it is less than two thirds of what we actually have.

Keyword search: If you do a keyword search on "Surprise symphony," you retrieve about half of what we own at this time.

Searching for a piece of music by the author first, and then using the "locate in results" box to find a title is the method we almost always recommend to do the most complete search in our catalog.