August 2009
- Featured playlist of the month: Doo Dah Days
- ALA update and planning ahead for Midwinter
- New promotional tools for Music Online collections
- A new embeddable search widget
- Lots of new content and recordings…
- New playlist functionality
- Visit Alexander Street at NMM, AMS, SEM, or ALA Midwinter
- Free Music Download
| One of the best-loved features of Music Online is the ability to create and share playlists. Every month, we feature a different playlist and interview its author with an eye toward sharing library promotion tips and teaching aids that you can replicate in your library. If you have a playlist you’d like us to consider featuring, please email us at music@alexanderstreet.com. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Cathy Chaparro is the author of this month’s featured playlist, which she created in conjunction with the Pittsburgh-area annual Stephen Foster Music and Heritage Festival, “Doo Dah Days.” “I created the playlist to go with a Web page on Stephen Foster that we had been thinking about for some time, since Stephen Foster was born in Pittsburgh, and the local neighborhood of Lawrenceville celebration is in July each year.” Chaparro’s playlist includes 15 recordings of works by the man considered to be America’s first professional composer, as performed by a wide range of artists, including Angelina Baker, Wayne Erbsen, and Pete Seeger. Recordings in the playlist include “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Swanee River,” as well as Chaparro’s current favorite, “Nelly Bly,”—“because,” says Chaparro, “it’s such a lively tune, and I like the journalist who was given that pen name after the Foster tune.” Chaparro also took advantage of the Alexander Street playlist functionality that let her include materials from anywhere on the Web, linking out to other Stephen Foster Web resources, such as the official Doo Dah Days Web site, and Stephen Foster’s 1851 Sketchbook, hosted on the Web site of The Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh, which is the principal repository for materials pertaining to Foster. The result of Chaparro’s efforts is a fun and incredibly rich multi-media guide that will be of use both to the local Pittsburgh community and to anyone with an interest in Stephen Collins Foster. For help creating a playlist like Cathy Chaparro’s for your library, access our Music Online playlist tutorial—it will walk you through the fundamentals of creating, annotating, and sharing playlists. You can also upload the tutorial and make it available to users on your library Web site so that they can create playlists of their favorite recordings. |
| If you weren’t able to attend the Alexander Street Customer Appreciation Breakfast at the American Libraries Association meeting in Chicago this past July, watch jazz, film, and culture critic Gary Giddins talk about his experience as a jazz critic, about the future of the music industry, and the role and importance of jazz in American culture now. And check out the Gary Giddins playlist, with links to all things Gary Giddins. The ALA Midwinter meeting will be here in no time—if you’re planning on going to Boston and you’d like to come to one of our unforgettable breakfast events—or if you’d like to participate in an Alexander Street focus group for music collections—email marketing@alexanderstreet.com with the words “add me to your breakfast list,” or, “add me to your focus group list,” and we’ll do it! |
We’ve just released several new marketing tools to support libraries and help drive usage. See the complete collection of product buttons, digital billboards, customizable bookmarks and posters, search engine add-ons, video tutorials, and user guides here: http://alexanderstreet.com/resources/index.htm.
NEW! Embeddable search widgets let you publicize your online collections and help library patrons quickly search these online resources from wherever they are.
Embedding the widget is as simple as copying a few lines of code and pasting it into the HTML code of your Web page or blog. If you're an experienced HTML user, you can customize the widget to match your page's theme. Take a look at The University of Pennsylvania's Music Library Web page for an example of a customized Music Online search widget.
Below is an example of the Music Online widget.
| Alexander Street Press: Music Online Cross-search audio, video, scores, and full-text reference content |
Detailed instructions and HTML code for the embeddable search widgets can be found at http://alexanderstreet.com/resources/widgets.htm.
| Just a reminder that Alexander Street’s continuously growing music listening and reference collections are now cross-searchable*, delivering audio recordings, video content, full-text reference materials, musical scores, liner notes, biographies, and images through a single interface. * Smithsonian Global Sound is the only Alexander Street music collection not yet cross-searchable via the Music Online interface; it will be added to the cross-search platform by October of 2009.
We’re continuously adding new content to Music Online collections. To see a complete listing of all new content added in the past month, visit the Music Online cross-search interface and click on the “What’s New” tab at http://muco.alexanderstreet.com/WhatsNew. Or consult the “What’s New” tab on any one of our individual music and performing arts collections. Here’s what’s new since our last update:
Our thanks to everyone who has given us feedback and helped us to launch an interface that offers important new functionality without sacrificing any of the features you’ve come to trust and depend on. If you have any other suggestions, we’d love to hear them—email us at marketing@alexanderstreet.com.
Classical Scores Library also includes new technical features, including a faster-loading image viewer that makes it easier to access long scores, regardless of your bandwidth. The new image viewer lets you view individual pages of a score without having to wait for the full PDF to load, and ultimately delivers a smoother and faster experience for all users. Other enhancements include thumbnail images that let you see and scroll through multiple pages without having to open the score; and new printing options let you print an entire score, just a movement, or a range of pages you select. All of these enhanced features are also included within the new Music Online cross-search interface.
Responding to feedback from a number of libraries and users, we started by integrating the more than 17,000 recordings that were previously part of African American Song. Separately, we’ve added more than 35,000 new recordings to the collection. In the last month alone, we’ve added 1,273 albums. American Song now contains 3,275 albums totaling 57,465 recordings—and it’s all cross-searchable through Music Online.
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| The 31st National Media Market October 4-8, Lexington, KY http://www.nmm.net/ This is the first time Alexander Street will participate at NMM as an exhibitor. If you’re headed to NMM, be sure to attend our screening sessions in suite # 309, where we’ll give demonstrations of each of our streaming online music and video collections. American Musicological Society November 12-15, Philadelphia, PA http://www.ams-net.org/philadelphia/ Society of Ethnomusicology November 19-22, Mexico City, Mexico http://www.indiana.edu/~semhome/2009/ ALA Midwinter 2010 January 15-19, Boston, MA http://www.ala.org/ala/conferencesevents/upcoming/midwinter/2010/index.cfm |
Witold Lutoslawski, a Polish composer, conductor and pianist, composed this Overture for string orchestra in 1949. His compositional style, more structured at first, changed to include more twelve-tone techniques after Poland relaxed travel restrictions in the late 1950s and Lutoslawksi was able to visit the US and Britain.
This recording is performed by the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie; Jean-Paul Dessy (Conductor).
Download this work now through September 8, 2009.
To keep up with all Alexander Street free music downloads, visit http://musicdownloads.alexanderstreet.com/promo/ and subscribe to the Music Online blog RSS feed.
Liz Dutton, Music Editor
Alexander Street Press
music@alexanderstreet.com
http://alexanderstreet.com/products/muso.htm
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