Leading the way are African American Song (AAS) and Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries. Both match a unique musical resource, with authoritative liner notes to help place the recorded material into scholarly context. We look forward to the release later this year of African American Music Reference, which will merge with AAS to produce an even more powerful resource.

Rock's Backpages is the most entertaining product we have ever reviewed. This archive of rock criticism from the early 1960s onward is sure to be popular with everyone from the baby boomer Chuck Berry fan to the 16-year-old who has just discovered Pink Floyd. What's more, it opens up a unique window into the culture of the past 40 years that few libraries have been able to capture.

Taking Apple's advice to “think different,” we also looked at the iTunes Music Store, a resource with tremendous potential for libraries. If you have wondered how to see one of the Oscar nominees in the Best Live Action Short Film category, take note: you can download them all from iTunes for $1.99 each!

Finally, Gale's Popular Culture eCollection deftly combines a handful of ebooks dealing with pop culture with a select subset of periodical titles from the InfoTrac database to form a coherent and multidimensional research tool.

Content  African American Song is the latest music-listening database produced by Alexander Street to include blues, jazz, ragtime, gospel, narratives, and other forms of African American musical expression. The resource joins nearly 30 critically acclaimed humanities collections that cover music history and literature, drama, theater, film, religion, and social thought.

The initial January 2006 release contains 16,000-plus tracks from Document Records, “the world's largest collection of rare and vintage blues, jazz, spiritual, gospel, boogie-woogie, and country recordings,” with artists such as Bessie Brown, the Sparks Brothers, and Alberta Hunter. Also provided are all the liner notes from these albums, which in itself is a fascinating collection of archival material for music enthusiasts.

African American Song will continue to grow to 50,000 audio tracks, including collections of recordings by the top 50 names in the history of black American music, among them Ma Rainey, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Bumble Bee Slim, and William “Bunk” Johnson to name-drop just a few. Of those, about 5000 will be rare or unpublished recordings digitized from archives previously accessible only on tape. More than 2300 performers are expected to make appearances in the collection, representing songs from the earliest recordings of African American music made in the late 19th century through performances in the 1970s. The full recorded works of each artist will be available in most cases.

In the planning stages for future release are recordings from Rounder Records, with a collection of Caribbean music and online access to the extensive Alan Lomax Collection, which includes the Jelly Roll Morton series (complete Library of Congress recordings), the Leadbelly series, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Also in arrangement are the WITNESS recordings from the musical organization VocalEssence, a collection of albums showcasing the music of African American art-song composers, arrangers, and performers.

Searchability Comparable to Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, the opening screen for African American Song offers easy navigation, with tools and browse categories on the left-side frame, a simple search box for those who want to dive right in, and tabs at the top of the page for Search (Advanced), Playlist Folders, and Help. The middle section displays informative text and a Featured Playlist (currently “Early Gospel Greats”). This area organizes themed playlists, which are collections of tracks grouped under a title or genre. Users can copy existing playlists or create their own and store them in password-protected “My Play­list” folders for future use. Teaching faculty and librarians can easily use this as a handy tool to create and share course music, and durable URLs allow course folders as well as individual tracks to be incorporated into Blackboard or placed on e-reserve.

Users may browse by Album, Genre, Instrument, Artist, Ensemble, and Label; Region and Time Period will soon be available, which will be welcome additions. Category Browse includes American Folk, Blues, Jazz, Ragtime, Sacred, Spoken Words & Sounds, and Stage & Screen. The Browse option affords users a step-by-step operation, allowing them to narrow their search as they proceed, and users can retrieve the same results either through the category subhierarchies or with a series of pull-down limiters. Selecting Sacred, for example, displays all tracks within that category. We may then limit the search by artist, instrument, subgenre, label, or ensemble. Limiting to the subgenre of Folk Spirituals and artist, we were able to narrow our focus to five recordings by Jimmie Struthers and Joe Lee, including “We Are Almost Down to the Shore,” “Rise, Run Along, Mourner,” and “Do, Lord, Remember Me.” In addition to playing the desired track, recording details let users find tracks featuring the particular artist retrieved, add the track to a playlist, or view all the tracks on the album.

Advanced Search offers limiting within eight fields, including genre, work/track title, label, and ensemble. After choosing a field, users can select from an A–Z field list for control and specificity and enable automatic spell-checking for artist and ensemble. The system allows Boolean “AND” and “OR” logic.

All search/browse options are accessible throughout the session, offering both novice and savvy users the ability to switch modes seamlessly depending on the query or strategy. At present, the PDF format liner notes are not searchable, but we see great value in having them indexed in a future release.

Price Subscriptions start at $995, with prices based on simultaneous user level. Thirty-day trials are available.

Who Needs It? This is a unique and affordable online music-listening service by a highly regarded vendor. Its incredible content—both already available and soon to be available—makes it simply amazing. With its collection of diverse material, African American Song also can function as a serious research tool for placing the African American experience in a cultural, historical, and social context. Buy it for the liner notes alone!

iTunes Music Store
Apple Computer, Inc.

Content iTunes Music Store is the model for the legal online distribution of copyrighted music and video content. It contains over two million tracks representing virtually every musical genre—alternative, blues, children's, classical, comedy, country, dance, electronic, folk, hip-hop/rap, inspirational, jazz, Latin, New Age, pop, R&B/soul, reggae, rock, soundtracks, vocal, and world music—and Apple has secured the participation of a wide variety of major and independent labels.

Quickly outgrowing its music roots, iTunes Music Store currently has an archive of 16,000 audiobooks, 3000 music videos, a choice selection of short films, and a rapidly growing number of television shows. Visitors to the web site may also listen to (and subscribe to) hundreds of free podcasts in more than 20 broad subject areas (e.g., Business, Education, Politics).

New releases, iTunes exclusives, staff favorites, and recently added titles are prominently displayed on the iTunes Music Store homepage, as are the day's most frequently downloaded songs, albums, and videos. Celebrity playlists are featured on the homepage as well, along with a limited number of free downloads.

Apple has made a concerted effort to capitalize on this extraordinary resource by creating a variety of custom and original features such as iTunes Essentials and iTunes Originals. The former are themed collections of playlists that come in three varieties: Artist Essentials, Genres & History (e.g., “East Coast Hip-Hop,” “Experimental Electronica”), and My Groove (e.g., “Breakup Songs,” “Gay Pride Month”). Each collection is organized into three levels—The Basics, Next Step, Deep Cuts—of about two dozen tracks each, although songs may be purchased individually. The latter are artist retrospectives featuring exclusive live studio performances, interviews, and selected album tracks.

Songs are available in the high-fidelity Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format but may be converted to other, more compressed audio formats if that is what suits the purchaser's needs. Once purchased, downloaded music may be burned (multiple times) onto CDs for circulation to library users or shared over a local area network within the necessarily restrictive confines of Apple's approach to digital rights ­management.

Searchability A prominent pull-down menu labeled Choose Genre provides easy access to the Music Store's musical content. Selecting Latin takes the user to a page structured very similarly to the main page but with Latin artists and recordings populating every facet of this area—from the featured albums and new releases to the celebrity playlists and top downloads of the day.

Browse takes the user to a listing of the various genres available in the Music Store. Clicking on Opera produces an alphabetical (by first name) list of composers, conductors, performers, and musical ensembles. If you select any of these, a pop-up window will display a listing of their available works. Power Search lets users key in the Song, Artist, Album, or Composer they are looking for and limit by Genre via a pull-down menu. For additional access, the familiar Apple search box appears on every page of the site, here labeled Search Music Store.

The results list displays song titles, playing time, artist name, album title, price (with a Buy Song button), and Genre and in some cases indicates whether the song is available in a Clean or Explicit version. Audio and video samples allow preview of files before purchasing.

Price Typically, it's 99¢ per song; most albums go for $9.99, although there is some variation. Music videos, short films, and TV shows (minus commercials) are priced at $1.99 per episode, and all episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 7, for example, are available for $31.84. Audiobook pricing varies.

Who Needs It? With over one billion legal downloads, iTunes Music Store is clearly a success story in terms of making music—and now video content—available via an online resource. Librarians need to start to think (or “think different,” as Apple would have it) about how iTunes fits into their collection building, replacement, preservation, and reference plans.

Pop Culture eCollection
Thomson Gale

Content Thomson Gale currently offers eight specialty e-collections that combine a mix of reference books from a variety of publishers in ebook format with full-text periodicals chosen by collection and subject experts. Targeted primarily at high school and up audience, the Pop Culture eCollection will be of interest to those fascinated with 20th-century studies, with topics ranging from “fast food and fitness fads to political events and literary genres.”

Reference titles include the two-volume Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990 (Schirmer Reference), the five-volume Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of 20th-Century America (UXL), Contemporary Fashion (St. James Pr.), the four-volume International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (St. James Pr.), the five-volume St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, the 11-volume UXL American Decades, and the 2006 and 2007 editions of Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever (Thomson Gale). Some 100 “subject-appropriate” (and eclectic) periodicals round out the collection, among them Billboard, CosmoGirl!, Esquire, GIG, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair.

Several of the reference titles are also available for separate purchase via the Gale Virtual Reference Library. All e-collections are accessible within the PowerSearch platform and are cross-searchable with other Thomson Gale content if subscribed. Content includes authoritative signed essays, photographs, a time frame index by decades, 550 musician biographies, with select discographies, musical terms, and genre index.

That's not all: there is coverage of 450-plus designers, milliners, footwear designers, fashion companies and textile houses, major topics such as social history of the 20th and 21st centuries, television, movies, sports, fashion, hairstyles, slang, health, politics, and trends. As with other Thomson Gale products, Pop Culture eCollection allows users to “InfoMark” (a special bookmarking feature) throughout the session for future use.

Searchability Pop Culture eCollection can be selected or added to a cross search from the common menu screen. “Basic Search” (with search for words in keyword) is the default method, and users can opt to select quickly “More search options,” expanding the simple search box to include limiting by date/title/peer review, full text/documents with images. Boolean operators and wildcard characters can be entered as well, and the query can be limited to “words in subject” or “words in full-text.” The results page displays a hierarchical Subject Guide in a sidebar on the left of the screen, with Related Searches for refining a query, with Broader, Narrower, and See Also terms if applicable.

Search results are categorized with tabs by document type, which is handy for quick prioritizing of relevant information. A basic keyword search for hairstyles resulted in 900-plus journal articles, 11 reference articles, and a current fashion update from the Christian Science Monitor on American male ­hairstyles.

This newcomer gets bonus points for allowing users to scan quickly through the Reference titles via the “About this publication” link, with linkable index, table of contents, and illustrations. Selections from Reference titles include a “View other articles linked to these index terms” at the end of each piece. In addition, linked subject terms are displayed at the bottom of each retrieved journal article, allowing searchers to view all related documents within the collection.

Users can opt to perform a Subject Guide Search, Publication Search, and Advanced Search at any point in the session. The Publication Search allows users to search by any word in title or “List All” to retrieve a detailed publication schedule for every title, with format, full-text coverage, and index coverage included. Once a title is selected, users can browse through individual volumes and issues or search by keyword within the publication. It's easy to drill down to find a specific article.

On the downside, we retrieved confusing results with Advanced Search, which offers 20-plus indexes via a pull-down menu. A “brand name” index search for “tide” did result in seven journal articles promoting or detailing the newest scent or ad campaign for the detergent, but we also retrieved 12 articles in the News category that contained the keyword tide, having nothing to do with the Procter & Gamble product.

Kudos for enhancements, as export options have improved considerably with this latest version. Individual citations and/or full records or entire marked record lists can now be emailed, displayed, or printed depending on needs. Full customization is available, enabling linking to additional full-text resources, interlibrary loan, and/or online catalogs.

Price Academic libraries with fewer than 5000 FTE that purchase the complete e-collection pay $2,167 for the ebook component, plus $420 for the 100 InfoTrac journals in the first year of service. After that, there is an annual hosting fee of $50 for the eight ebooks as well as the ongoing annual cost of the journals. (The journal subscription price is waived for InfoTrac OneFile customers.) Thirty-day trials are available.

Who Needs It? If you're looking for a niche collection, Pop Culture eCollection fits the bill, as the database offers a combined 1,526,626 documents for searching and is an affordable way to provide access to this type of material. The PowerSearch platform has excellent features and functionality for general searching, navigation, and cross-search capabilities, and if you are already an InfoTrac customer, the ebook collection will be a nice addition. Geared toward the slightly younger set, the information, illustrations, and chronology of events covered here are key for understanding popular culture trends and fads.

Rock's Backpages
Backpages Limited

Content Rock's Backpages represents the gold standard of rock writing, combining a mouth-watering lineup of classic fanzines—Punk, Trouser Press, Bomp, and the slightly more legitimate Creem—with more mainstream staples of the popular music press, including Spin and Rolling Stone. It also stirs in genre titles like Blues Revue and a choice selection of contemporary British publications such as Mojo, NME, and Uncut. The result is a source list that is unique and, for rock fans, simply irresistible.

A number of temptations beckon from the Library page. The left-hand frame provides access to a discussion Forum, Audio interviews, Writers profiles, and Links to radio stations and rock-related web sites. A listing of The Top Ten Articles Read Last Week and a second that identifies new additions (“Chris Roberts meets the king and queen of rural doom, the Cowboy Junkies” from a 1990 issue of Melody Maker) help communicate the sort of material a searcher will find here.

Between 8000 and 9000 articles, interviews, and reviews dating from 1963 through 2005 are currently incorporated into the Library, which grows by 30 to 50 articles per week.

Searchability Searchers enter the Library using the Quick Search by ARTIST mode—seven alphabetically grouped pull-down menus plus another organized by number (including 10,000 Maniacs, The 101'ers, and several other bands). The A–Z list of artists, which provides a more easily navigated full-page display, is a welcome alternative to the pull-down menus.

Quick Search by Writer gives the searcher a look at the nearly 300 rock critics assembled here, including Lester Bangs, Anthony DeCurtis, Greil Marcus, David Marsh, and Ed Ward. Absent, however, are Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, and Jon Parales of the New York Times.

Generally, the Quick Search by Subject vocabulary is descriptive enough to be intelligible (Punk, Surf, Tex-Mex, and Chicano) and broad enough to be meaningful (Metal, but not Metal's dozens of painful-sounding subgenres). A few of these entries, however, are likely to be completely mysterious to all but the cognoscenti. Genre terms like Crusty and Sunshine Pop with a single article each or Paisley Underground with just four pieces in the Library provide little value in terms of access to the resource's contents.

The Subject menu also serves as a vehicle for finding themes that are closely associated with rock, such as, for example, Music and the net; Politics and society; Recording, production and technology; and, of course, Drugs. Here, too, the searcher can opt for A–Z subject access to Rock's Backpages' contents.

Tucked below the A–Z list of subjects (and well down the screen) is a single search box. A pull-down menu enables the searcher to determine how the terms should relate to one another—i.e., as a phrase, or implicitly, or in Boolean combinations.

Advanced Search mode combines a single text box with six pull-down menus. As in Quick Search, the first pull-down enables searchers to find their terms when they appear as a phrase or in combination.

The next pull-down option lets users search all years or limit the search to one specific year. There is no date range search option. The remaining pull-downs enable users to tailor their rock literature searches by subject/genre, rock writer, or artist as they would in Quick Search. The artist list, now combining seven very long lists into one seemingly endless one, will send most users back to the keyword search box. Rock's Backpages also adds a magazine title index in Advanced Search, and all of these indexes may be mixed, matched, and combined with keyword terms as the searcher sees fit.

When we tried to find Lester Bangs's classic defense of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music in Creem and the account of Bono's transformative encounter with Keith Richards in Musician, we came up empty-handed. However, what we did find was an interview in which a genial Reed enthusiastically recalls the jazz show he hosted during his college days. A testimony from a waiter (corroborated by a bartender) that Keith is a generous tipper was admittedly just as engaging.

Overall, search capabilities are adequate but not flashy. There is no mention of truncation (nor any online help at all, for that matter), although we did get several more hits with a search for “on new york doll” than “on new york dolls.” There is no marking, saving, emailing, or exporting to a bibliographic management application.

Price A six-month personal subscription goes for $30; for a full year, it is $50. The annual subscription cost for academic libraries is $1000. Public libraries and private schools pay $450, and public schools may have access for just $150 per year.

Who Needs It? From a librarian's perspective, the ideal electronic resource provides cover-to-cover full-text access to a set list of periodical titles over a fixed range of years. While that is unquestionably a good thing, it is not what's happening here. Yes, Rock's Backpages is about rock music, but more than that it is about how much rock writers really love rock music. It is about the connection between rock writers and the musicians they revere but whom they also hold to a very high standard. It is about writers who are thoroughly conversant with the work they review and every musical project in which the artist in question ever had a hand. It is about interviews that are not just intimate but almost seductively so.

For the user, Rock's Backpages is equally about discovery and rediscovery. Because the gaps in its coverage mean you can't replace those 25-year-old copies of Trouser Press electronically is immaterial, since the individual subscriber whom this resource targets is not going to part with a treasure like that anyway.

Rock's Backpages is also a treasure from a librarian's view, because there is nothing out there that is even remotely like it for exploring the past 40 years of rock music history or the culture that rock music helped to shape. Be cool. Subscribe.

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
Alexander Street Press

Content If Magellan had access to Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, he might have stayed home. The resource, which draws primarily from the archives of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label, consists of more than 35,000 tracks of music and spoken-word recordings from all over the globe. Folkways is the label of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jean Ritchie, and Pete Seeger, as everyone knows, but contemporary musicians such as Christine Lavin and Lucinda Williams can be found here as well. In fact, the label has documented sounds of all kinds—from animals to thunderstorms—and for fans of interspecies communication, there is even a duet between guitarist Jim Nollman and an orca.

Global Sound for Libraries supplements Folk­ways material with recordings from Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon, and other labels along with the contents of the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University and the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies. This is not a static archival enterprise by any means.

The Tools area of the homepage gives users quick access to any personal playlists they may have created plus course folders to which users might have access. Musical explorers may also view a selection of Themed Playlists—“Smithsonian Folkways Children's Collection,” “Raices Latinas: Smithsonian Folkways Latino Roots Collection,” or simply “Spoken Word”—to sample what Global Sound for Libraries has to offer, and Radio Global Sound allows listeners to tune into streamed audio tracks developed along a number of compelling themes, including “A Young Bob Dylan's Folkways Routes” and “Afro-Latino.”

Searchability Access to Global Sound for Libraries begins with the homepage, where a quick search box lets searchers plunge directly into the contents. While this approach should serve the knowledgeable searcher fairly well, users who are not well versed in the many varieties of global music will benefit from the steady guiding hand of this resource's browsing capabilities.

The left-hand frame facilitates browsing by musical Category or via an A–Z arrangement by Country, Genre, Cultural Group, Instrument, Artist, Ensemble, or Label. Clicking on Instrument took us to a screen where we were directed in Step 1 to “Choose an instrument category.” Mousing over the nearly 12,000 tracks that featured Chordophones causes the instructions for Step 2 of the search (“View all tracks featuring Electronic or choose an instrument group below”) to pop up along with a list of 20 or so stringed instruments. Again, mousing over Oud brings up Step 3 in the process: “View all tracks featuring Oud or choose a specific instrument below.” This selection takes the searcher to a results page displaying individual tracks along with a succession of pull-down menus that enable narrowing by any of the remaining indexes.

Multiple indexes may be used in combination but must be added to the search strategy one at a time. With each refinement, only viable search terms are displayed in the various pull-down menus—a brilliant way to keep the searcher from running into a dead end.

Browsing by musical Category—including American Folk, Blues, Bluegrass, Old Time Country, American Indian, World, Jazz, Classical & Broadway, Spoken Word & Sounds, and Children's—permits narrowing via the same set of indexes noted above. Results lists include the title of each track, playing time, performers' names, album title, and a succession of buttons that call up the Windows Media–based player, additional information on the track, and a utility for creating a playlist or adding a track to one that already exists. Given that there is no marking capability and that the contents of an album have to be added to a playlist track by track, this is a pretty cumbersome process.

A searcher may view the static URL for each track, which may be bookmarked or incorporated into a web-based document for visiting at a later time. Where liner notes exist, they may be viewed as PDFs from the results. Needless to say, the liner notes represent a rich resource for the researcher given the authoritative status of the ethno­musicologists associated with Smithsonian Folkways, and it would be valuable if they were indexed, too.

Advanced Search permits users to limit the search to a particular index using keywords of their choosing, or, alternatively, the controlled vocabulary terms imported from the appropriate list. Advanced Search offers automatic spell-checking and Boolean capabilities, but Global Sound for Libraries is a resource in which the hierarchical steps associated with Browse mode are likely to serve most users much better.

Sound quality, streamed at 64kbps, is decent if not dazzling. Given that many of the recordings in this collection were made in the field under less than ideal conditions, the norm is something less than audiophile-quality fidelity.

Price Basic subscriptions for the full Global Sound for Libraries archive start at $2500 for three simultaneous users. Consortium pricing is available as well, and prospective subscribers may arrange a trial.

Who Needs It? Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is well suited to academic settings where the sounds and cultures of people worldwide play a role in the overall educational experience. Instructors can link to specific tracks or whole playlists from an electronic reserve list, a course homepage, or from within a course management application like Blackboard so they will be easily accessible in and out of class. Beyond the confines of course requirements, though, Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries gives those interested in exploring the music of the world a vehicle for traveling wherever their instincts may take them.

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is a unique and impressive collection of music, not to mention a rich archive of everyday sound. With its many recent content enhancements, it stands as a solid product that becomes increasingly more attractive as the creative forces behind it continue to discover ways to make using it an even more rewarding experience.