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Author Topic: Online Resources  (Read 876 times)

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Offline uncle bud

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Online Resources
« on: January 20, 2010, 11:41:42 AM »
Got a library card for our big national (i.e. provincial) library the other day, and in addition to your usual borrowing privileges, it gives me access to a slew of online resources available via remote access from home. Dictionaries, newspapers, academic journals etc., and electronic books and databases. Among all of these delights, two leapt out at me rather quickly.

The first is African American Music Reference. This is a branch of the humunguous Music Online database. It is described as "the first comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression. This release includes 4,229 essays and images from 108 sources, over 31,157 pages." It aims to be 50,000 pages and contains e-books or pdf versions of quite a few publications of interest to blues fiends. A few examples include the complete text and illustrations of Abbott and Seroff's Ragged But Right, Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From, Guido Van Rijn's Kennedy's Blues, early publications by Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, early slave song collections, plantation songbooks, and many more.

The second electronic resource is American Song, an online, on-demand listening service that includes recordings from "Rounder Records, Appleseed Recordings, Stax, Specialty Records, Testament Records, McNeil Music, Native Ground Music, Rebel Records, County Records, Smithsonian Folkways, Document Records and more... The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests.... This release includes 3,818 albums, equalling 64,857 tracks, growing regularly."

American Song has absorbed the resource formerly known as African American Music, now African American Song, which is 16,000+ tracks from the Document catalogue plus another 18,000 from Arhoolie, Rounder, Folkways, Biograph, Testament and others. All tracks available for on-demand streaming (not downloading, just to be clear). With liner notes in PDF. Excuse me while I swoon in front of my computer.

Anyway, you may want to check what your local library offers. You may be pleasantly floored like me.


 


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