With 35,000 tracks from 138 different countries, Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, from online-only reference publisher Alexander Street Press, offers music for students and those simply curious about parts of the world that are not represented on iTunes—an impressive, easy-to-use database of streaming folk music, along with some blues, jazz and children’s songs. The database includes recordings of the entire Smithsonian Folkways collection, African music recorded by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music and music recorded on the South Asian peninsula as well as the catalogues for labels such as Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor and Paredo. While the bulk of the collection comes from North America, a substantial number of tracks can be found from sub-Saharan Africa (1,321), the Caribbean (1,503) and Asia (1,534). Users can search by country, culture group, genre or even instrument —making it easy to find a Civil War ballad, monks chanting in Tibet, a Pushtu love song or a funeral lament played on a wooden jaw harp. There’s also an extensive children’s collection, with games, stories and sing-alongs from around the world. Though tracks cannot be downloaded—patrons must listen to them at the library—users can create and save unique password-protected playlists.