Classical Music Reference Library.

[Alexandria, VA]: Alexander Street Press, 2007--. http://bakr.alexanderstreet.com/ (Accessed April to May 2011). [Requires a Web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or Firefox 1.0 or higher recommended), an Internet connection, and Adobe Reader. Pricing: annual subscription from $545 to $3,229 per year, or one-time purchase from $6,250 to $25,000 depending on library type, size, and materials budget; unlimited simultaneous users.]

Launched in 2007, Alexander Street Press (ASP)'s Classical Music Reference Library (hereafter CN1RL) contains 28,504 essays and images from thirty-nine sources as Of II May 2011. A reference text complement to ASP's online audio, video, and score databases, CMRL covers all classical genres, with an emphasis on biographies. The majority of the CURL content is academic research level, with a few juvenile works.

Three standard reference works--Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Baker's Dictionary of Music, and Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music--form the core of CNIRL, as reflected in the domain name. The other substantial reference sets are Women Composers: Music through the Ages, volumes 1 through 8, and Music Since 1900, 6th edition. Other content includes ten books from the Princeton University Press "... and His World" series, a few books from several university presses and Greenwood Press, and liner notes from recordings that are found in ASP's Classical Music Library.

The layout of CMRL will be familiar to users of other ASP resources such as Classical Music Library, Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and Dance in Video. The CMRL and the other ASP music databases are searchable through the Music Online portal at http://muco.alexanderstreetpress.com. This review will focus specifically on the CMRL interface. A basic search box near the top right will satisfy the typical user. According to the Search Tips on the "Help" page, this basic search box defaults to an "OR" search. Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT may be used. Word order is disregarded, but quotation marks can be used to specify phrase searches, although this is not mentioned in the online Help. The search term is highlighted in the results in red font. This highlighting feature functions most effectively with single search terms, or words that appear as a phrase, such as "basso continuo" or "transverse flute." Entering multiple terms in the basic search box brings up results containing all the terms, but only the first is highlighted in red. Multiple-word searches without the use of' quotation marks or Boolean operators bring up relevancy-ranked results, starting with those containing the exact phrase or all the terms, and ending with instances of a single term.

Currently, the "Advanced Search" screen offers a text search box and a title search box. The title search box searches the monograph titles, titles of sound recordings with liner notes, and entry titles in the Baker's sets. This is a convenient way to bring up only the main Baker's entries for a person, along with any of the e-books or CD liner notes where the name is in the title. Interestingly, a title field search also retrieves some images and illustrations, depending on how these were indexed. Illustrations in the Deems Taylor, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Purcell, and Schumann biographies appear both within the text and in a separate section after the back matter. A title field search retrieves results from these individually indexed images at the back. Images from other books, such as The History of Classical Music and The Instruments of Music by Stuart Kallen, appear only within the text and do not come up by a title search. (Illustrations from the Princeton University Press books are omitted entirely.) Search results are presented in relevancy rank, with the option to resort by title. Additional fields for author, publisher, date range, and subjects appear on the "Advanced Search" screen in gray, with the note that they will be available in a future release. Elizabeth Brown Dutton, Editorial Director at ASP, indicates the 2012 schedule of updates is not yet finalized.

The results appear with a material type icon to the left of each hit for quick visual recognition of book, liner notes, and image resources. Results from the All Music Guide are indicated with a "bio" icon, while Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians entries are coded as "book." Two filtering choices are offered: biographies and reference works. The biography filter eliminates everything but the All Music Guide entries. Offering additional filters for images and liner notes would be very useful.

Browse functions by All People, All Reference Works, Genre, and Material Types are offered prominently down the left side of the CMRL home page. All resources except the All Music Guide and the liner not are available under the Browse "All Reference Works" link. Users not familiar with the Alexander Street Press database interface may be misled by the large, blue plus sign to the left of the reference title. The blue sign adds the resource to a playlist. The resource content may be accessed through the hyperlinked reference title, which leads to a screen with bibliographic information and a series of meta-data fields, followed by an expandable outline of the contents. (Contents for Alban Berg and His World, The History of Classical Music, The Instruments of Music, Music Since 1900, and Women Composers are listed by chapter, with no expandable groupings.) The text is presented in HTML with page numbers inserted in brackets. Most of the CMRL content is displayed in HTML, with the exception of liner notes. Also, scores from the Women Composers set are available as both very small JPEGs at their assigned page numbers and as PDF files appended at the end of each volume. It is not obvious in looking at the JPEGs that the PDFs are available; a link to the PDF file from the JPEG would be a nice feature. Tables, as well as some footnotes and bibliographies, are also displayed as barely-legible JPEGs, but are immediately reproduced in more legible HTML. An exception found at random is the "Kassia" article in Women Composers, volume one. The tables, footnotes, and bibliographies in this particular article are presented only in the JPEG format. Anyone consulting this article for serious research will find the CMRL JPEG impractical. Browsing Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians is not as convenient as one would like; browse results list each of the six volumes, with no indication of the range of entries in each volume. One has to guess that a name will be in a particular volume and click into that volume to verify. Once in the particular volume, the letters of the alphabet are listed, with the familiar plus sign that expands into a full list of the musicians covered. This segmentation of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music into volumes influences the display of keyword search results, with each volume listed in the results as a separate book.

The main entry screen of each volume or book offers a box to "Search text within this book" as well as the expandable content links described above. This volume-level keyword searching is very useful for locating all mentions of a particular term within a particular monograph. For example, the term "Steinway" appears dozens of times in the essay "The Pianos of Johannes Brahms," from Brahms and His World. "Steinway" also appears four times in other, less-obvious essays in that monograph. The search box responds to the use of quotation marks for phrases, which is extremely helpful with name searches. The results are displayed in brief view, each red-highlighted hit centered among about a dozen words. An option to show hits in the context of paragraphs expands the view from about 100 characters to 200. These results are not individually hyperlinked, but are displayed under a link to the chapter or volume.

The Browse All People function would seem to be an efficient means of accessing the significant content on a particular person, but in fact it fails to retrieve results from Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians or Music Since 1900. This is because the browse lists retrieve results based on the metadata fields associated with each screen, and the Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and Music Since 1900 entries are not individually indexed. Browsing All People presents an alphabetical list of the people indexed, followed by their occupation and a results count. There is a lack of correspondence between these results counts and what is actually retrieved. For example, the "Bach, Johann Sebastian" entry indicates nine results, but the link leads to eight. The "Beach, Amy" entry indicates fifty-one results, but the link leads to eleven. The Genre browse choices also draw from the metadata fields at the head of each chapter or entry. This attempt to provide subject analysis and access to content is laudable, but uneven at present.

One would hope an electronic edition of a classic resource would offer the power of keyword searching along with the strengths of the original print publication. Unfortunately, users wishing to access CMRL content through the individual book indexes will encounter a previously unreported bug. Most of the books include the index pages with entries hyperlinked to the correct pages, but many index entries that point to multiple pages are out of alignment. For example, a small section in Kalien's The History of Classical Music appears this way in the print edition:

Ambient Century, The (Prendergast), 80, 82, 88 ancient music early church influences on, 13, 15

The corresponding section of the online index appears as follows:

Ambient Century, The (Prendergast), 80 ancient music 82 early church influences on, 88

The alignment and linking problems continue throughout this index and others. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians contains handy indexes to Genres, Nationalities, and Women Composers and Musicians. Only the Genres and Nationalities indexes are available in CMRL; the Women Composers and Musicians index is missing. Another indexing oddity is the omission of the index to A Short History of Opera by Donald Jay Grout. Pages 911 to the end are simply not in the Classical Music Reference Library. (One can get around this omission by accessing A Short History of Opera in Google Books. While the complete book is not viewable in Google, the full index is there, with convenient hyperlinks to all the page references. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians is also available as an e-book through Gale, and a number of the Princeton University Press titles are available through Ebook Library and NetLibrary.) Will the typical user access these resources through their separate indexes? Probably not, but for those who would like to use the online version in more traditional ways the indexes will be difficult to use.

CMRL offers a number of the database conveniences libraries have come to expect. New content is featured on the home page, and an RSS feed of latest additions is available. Stable URLs called permalinks are offered for each page, and a print icon opens the page in a new window (minus the database title and navigation heading, thus saving a bit on paper). Book-level and product-level MARC records are available. The FAQs are helpful and will answer the most common user questions. There are no current plans to expand the monographic content, but along with forthcoming additional advanced search features, the CMRL "Help" screen indicates that "future releases will include links with Classical Music Library and Classical Scores Library for subscribing customers allow[ing] users to find reference materials, and then link straight to audio recordings or scores relevant to that material, as well as more detailed indexing."

The indexing problems, missing pages, and missing PDFs are disappointing in a four-year-old product, but the majority of users will be entirely satisfied with the keyword searching. Institutions seeking scholarly music text references to support the use of Alexander Street Press's Music Online site as a federated search portal will find The Classical Music Reference Library very beneficial.

BETH ROYALL

West Virginia University