Popular Culture E-Reference Ratings

African American Music Reference. Alexander St. www.alexanderstreet.com/products/aamr.htm
With nearly 4000 pages available, plus thousands of pages of liner notes from the vintage Document Records catalog, this resource has begun to move toward its goal: 50,000 pages worth of material associated with the world of African American music online, allowing researchers to examine the intersection of music and the African American experience. Additionally, subscribers to African American Song, the online audio companion, can listen to the music that they're studying. 

American Film Scripts Online. Alexander St. www.alexanderstreet.com/products/afso.htm
Easily searchable by writer, director, producer, actor, script title, scene, character, year, or theme and comprising 823 scripts by nearly 1000 screenwriters, this is an obvious purchase for institutions with comprehensive programs and coursework in film. About half the screenplays are previously unpublished and appear here as image files in PDF format, frequently with annotations and corrections by the writer, director, or actor who was the source of the script, making a unique resource even more fascinating. 

American Song. Alexander St. www.alexanderstreet.com/products/amso.htm
Aiming to become the “definitive source for American roots music and pre-1960 American popular music,” American Song includes 16,207 online tracks from 954 albums, on its way to a goal of 50,000 tracks. Genres covered range from African American styles, folk, and Native American to ragtime, rock, and Tex-Mex. Browsing the Historical Events index serves up everything from “The Day Columbus Got Lost” to a nearly unrecognizable “Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” the Clinton campaign song. 

Contemporary World Music. Alexander St. womu.alexanderstreet.com
While Smithsonian Global Sound (below) features the various ethnic and regional music of the world, Contemporary World Music—with 12,528 tracks from 913 albums—treats subscribers to a more contemporary hybrid of traditional and popular sounds. Genres include reggae, world beat, electronic, fusion, Afropop, and Bollywood, alongside Indian raga, flamenco, klezmer, and zydeco. Alexander Street pays attention to the more specialized Browse options—Places and Cultural Groups in this instance. 

Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text. EBSCO. www.ebscohost.com
This extensive resource provides complete, cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting (often author-supplied) for more than 300 scholarly and popular publications and supplements, with selective coverage of another 300 or so titles. Subscribers to the full-text version have access to the contents of more than 90 titles online. All aspects of the field are covered, including theory, preservation and restoration issues, writing, production, and cinematography, along with reviews of films and TV shows. 

Film Indexes Online. Film Indexes Online. film.chadwyck.com
The result of a partnership between the American and British film institutes, this is a potent gateway to the contents of three indispensable film resources: the AFI Catalog, with information on over 47,500 American feature films; Film Index International, with information on 120,000 films and more than 720,000 personalities; and FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals, with indexing and selective full text to over 325,000 journal articles. Databases may be cross-searched or searched individually. 

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online. Alexander St. www.alexanderstreet.com
The definitive scholarly reference work on the ethnic music of the world, with 9000 pages of text. Organized geographically, each volume includes a musical introduction to the region and examination of the issues and processes that underlie its traditions and themes. Ultimately, Alexander Street plans to add the premiere online library of recorded world music, Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries (below), to this file. 

International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. www.ebscohost.com
International in scope, this bibliography gives subscribers access to indexing and author-supplied abstracts for more than 140 full-text journals as well as another 300 full-text books, totaling over 60,000 items (journal articles, books and book chapters, and dissertation abstracts) in all. It is intended for the serious performing arts researcher and is easily cross-searchable with other relevant EBSCO databases. 

Naxos Music Library Jazz. Naxos. www.naxos.com
Naxos (with the work of over 500 musicians from 2300 albums on over 22,000 tracks) is built primarily on the catalog of Fantasy Jazz and the 20 or so labels that moved in Fantasy's orbit and were responsible for releasing some of the most brilliant and fervently worshiped recordings from the most visionary voices in jazz—Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk, Afro Blue Impressions by John Coltrane, and a ton of Miles Davis. Albums lack credits, however, and licensing issues prevent original liner notes from being reproduced. 

Oxford Music Online. Oxford Univ. www.oxfordmusiconline.com
Oxford Music Online integrates into one resource the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, dictionaries for opera, jazz, and musical terminology, and The Oxford Companion to Music. Subscribers may also add the 27,000-entry-long Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Biographies feature complete discographies, and recordings are rated using a five-star system. Advanced search, incidentally, gives collection builders a nice tool that takes advantage of the album ratings. 

Pop Culture Universe. Greenwood. www.greenwood.com
If the study of pop culture still needs legitimizing, this newly released file may be the resource to do it. Scholarly at its core but highly accessible, this contains 307 books, 17,000-plus encyclopedia entries, and over 6600 images. Quick Search and an Advanced Search mode (which combines keyword queries with pull-downs for Subject, People, Time, and Place) are complemented by a variety of logical access points—by broad Subject and by Decade. Various classroom resources reside in the Skills Center. 

Rock's Backpages. Backpages Limited. www.rocksbackpages.com
With a library consisting of 12,000 articles, interviews, and reviews from the 1950s to the present representing the gold standard of rock writing, Rock's Backpages combines a lineup of classic fanzines (Trouser Press) with mainstream staples (Rolling Stone), genre titles (Living Blues), and a choice selection of contemporary British publications (Mojo and Uncut). Dozens of audio interviews with everyone from David Bowie to Johnny Cash supplement the content; there's nothing remotely like this file for exploring rock's culture. 

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries. Alexander St. www.alexanderstreet.com
Drawing its content primarily from the archives of Folkways Recordings (the label of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger), this file is comprised of more than 35,000 tracks of music and spoken-word recordings from around the globe. Folkways, in fact, has documented everyday sounds of all kinds—from animals to thunderstorms to a busy office. Users can create personal playlists or access course folders and themed playlists assembled to show off the rich content here. If Magellan had access to this, he might have stayed home.

Bruce Connolly is Head of Public Services at the Union College Schaffer Library in Schenectady, NY. He has made presentations on music file sharing in academic libraries at the ACRL/NY and Internet Librarian conferences. He has also collaborated with colleague Gail Golderman (below) on articles examining various approaches to engaging Net Gen students for Serials Librarian and Urban Library Journal and contributes the quarterly E-Reviews column for LJ's netConnect.