Collection News for April 2008

• April is Jazz Appreciation Month
• April is Poetry Month
• April has National Library Week

 

 

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has led this nationwide effort to recognize America's great creative contribution since 2002. Visit the Smithsonian web site for Jazz Month posters, Jazz 365 (this day in Jazz history), oral histories, and school activities, songs and lesson plans on jazz immortals such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Carter.

In our online collections, you will discover thousands of facts, biographies, discographies, and videographies in the new Encyclopedia of Popular Music, a part of Oxford Music Online. A digital version of Colin Larkin's 10-volume Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th Edition, this database offers 27,000 entries covering not just jazz but popular music of all genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music. The Encyclopedia also offers thousands of additional entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals. Key dates, biographies, and further reading are provided for artists covered, along with complete discographies that include record labels and release dates.

Though the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is known primarily for its extensive coverage of classical works and composers, the online version has a sizable collection of articles on jazz musicians, composers, styles, organizations, and festivals. Articles are drawn from the 2nd edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) and include longer treatments of overview topics such as the history of jazz. Later this summer, Grove will join the Encyclopedia of Popular Music in Oxford Music Online, which will feature links out to audio files and periodical articles.

The Naxos Music Library offers streaming audio of classical, world and folk, and even contemporary jazz, including selections from Cuba, Brazil, hep cats from Hungary, and many swingin' Scandinavians.

For more listening and learning opportunities, visit free Web sites such as the Red Hot Jazz Archive, which features recordings and history of the genre before 1930, the Library of Congress' Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz, or their Jazz on the Screen, a filmography of jazz music in movies. Hey, you could even visit our Performing Arts and Media department and check out some jazz!

 

 

April is also National Poetry Month and is a time when many students are working on literature research papers. But April doesn't have to be the cruelest month, if you let the Libraries help you locate literary criticism in these resources:

 

Literature Resource Center (LRC) offers background information on works of literature and types of works from all time periods as well biographical sketches of more than 13,000 authors. Here you will find essays on writers and works from Homer to Harry Potter and beyond, as well as a literary timeline and an encyclopedia of literary terms and concepts.

Whether you need essays on local poets such as Miller Williams or Mohja Kahf or critical evaluations frequently-assigned works such as "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, " The Red Wheelbarrow," by William Carlos Williams, or W.B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," LRC can give you a head start on your research.

In contrast to the basic info in LRC, the MLA International Bibliography (MLA) is the comprehensive resource for locating criticism on "modern" literatures, from the Middle Ages to the present day. MLA also indexes articles, book chapters, and dissertations on film, language, and folkways. MLA is an especially useful tool for locating scholarly articles on thematic topics such as "the influence of blues and jazz on American poetry," "slam poetry and performance," or "poetry on the Internet."

So many poems were meant to be read aloud. On the Academy of American Poets' site, you can enjoy hundred of poets reading their work through the poets.org Audio Archive.

National Library Week is April 13-19 and the theme for 2008 is "Join the circle of knowledge @ your library."

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate.

 

Celebrate by circling the globe and visiting some breathtaking online collections from the great libraries of the world:

• Library of Congress: American Memory Project
• New York Public Library: Digital Gallery
• British Library: Treasures in Full
• Bibliothèque Nationale: Gallica
• Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek: Digital Collections
• National Library of Australia: National Treasures of Australia's Great Libraries
• National Diet Library, Japan: Porta
• The Huntington Library: Selected Treasures
• The Newberry Library: Digital Exhibits

 

Searching for digital libraries? You might try the OAIster search engine. OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. OAIster provides access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).

OAIster currently contains records for more than 15 million images, documents, films, and sound recordings, drawn from the collections of almost 1000 participating libraries, museums, and other institutions. OAIster can be searched by Title, Author/Creator, Subject, Language or Entire Record. Searches can also be limited by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset) and sorted by title, author, date and hit frequency.