Encore

Encore, another way to search for material, is front and center on the library's main page.

Encore, sometimes called a "discovery catalog," is helpful when you are beginning a research project and don’t know exactly what you want. You can search it like you search Google. If you experiment with it, you’ll notice a number of fun things: ways to limit your search on the left side, a tag cloud on the right side. Encore also searches databases that the catalog doesn’t, such as the Music Library’s database of recitals from the School of Music.

If you do try to search for music in Encore, using keywords might get you what you want and might not. Sometimes clicking on “Explore related searches”, which appears under your search, will lead you to the uniform title and make your search easier.

For example, if you are looking for Beethoven's Moonlight sonata and you search Encore for "Beethoven moonlight", you'll get a list of results that include those two terms. Notice that the first entry (as of August 2009) does not have Beethoven’s moonlight sonata on it.

If you then click on "Explore related searches"...

...you’ll notice that the uniform title for the sonata appears under "Related searches."

You can click on the result, "Sonatas, piano, no. 14, op. 27, no. 2, C# minor" to retrieve items that have that title.

This isn’t foolproof, though. Let’s try another search, "Mozart sonatas." If you click on "Explore related searches," you get a long list of possible sonatas, but not all.

We suggest that you use the classic catalog when searching for music, as you are more likely to find all scores and all recordings of the piece you are looking for.

There are changes in the works that may make Encore more friendly for music searching in the future. We'll see how they develop.