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14 Full-Text and Media Databases

Full-text Databases

Full-text databases provide online access to the full contents of the items they list. While bibliographic databases provide indexing of as many sources as possible, regardless of access, full-text databases license content from the copyright holders and provide the entire text through their search portal.Perhaps the best-known full-text database is JSTOR. The abbreviation JSTOR originated with the phrase “journal storage”– it stores digital versions of entire journal articles in PDF form, and makes those searchable. Because the full article is digitized, JSTOR allows you to search the entire text for a keyword or phrase, rather than only the metadata in a bibliographic database. However, full-text databases like JSTOR do not list content they have not licensed, so they are not well-suited to exhaustive searching of the literature on a topic. JSTOR has eventually grown to include some books, images, and primary sources, but it still is focused on access over indexing.

JSTOR is a non-profit business that pays the publishers of the content to license that material to include on their platform, and then charges libraries for access to the platform and the collected content. In many cases, those licenses have restrictions, such as not allowing JSTOR to include materials for the most recent year or more, since the publishers want institutions to also maintain their current subscriptions.

Another important example of a full-text database, Project MUSE, was formed as an alternative to third-party platforms like JSTOR. Project MUSE is cooperative venture of several academic publishers to create their own platform to provide access to their journals. For that reason, it tends to include very recent content, but to only include material from those collaborating publishers. So you’ll find more recent material, but from a smaller range of journals.

One further examples is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text. This database includes the vast majority of dissertations completed in the US, as well as many other countries; in many cases dissertations are automatically submitted to ProQuest as soon as they’re submitted to the university. This is a great resource, but only contains dissertations and theses. Note that in music, lots of dissertations are compositions, editions, or thematic catalogues, so this can be a more useful database than you might think!

 

Multimedia Databases

Some databases provides full access to content that is not “text” in the usual sense. Databases that primarily include audio, video, or images are, of course, important resources for music research. Some of the most important multimedia databases for music research that we have at UWM are:

Naxos Music Library: primarily streaming audio of classical music, particularly but not exclusively from the Naxos label.

 

Music Online databases (including Classical Music Library, Classical Scores Library, Smithsonian Global Sound, etc.). These databases, and many other multimedia and primary source databases, are from the Alexander Street Press vendor, so they all have similar interfaces and playlists can combine resources. Classical Music Library is streaming audio of classical music, with an emphasis on the 20th century; Classical Scores Library offers digital copies of thousands of scores that can be printed and/or annotated, and Smithsonian Global Sound includes a huge catalogue of streaming music mostly from the Smithsonian Folkways label.

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Music Inquiry : Research and Information Literacy Skills for Musicians (DRAFT) Copyright © by Anna Grau Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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