Music

Database trials

African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
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Brings together text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database is constantly expanding to include comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.
Available on campus to all, or off-campus to UMass Amherst students, staff and faculty with an UMass Amherst IT NetID (user name) and password.

The UMass Library has a trial subscription to the African American Music Reference database. The trial will continue through November 9, 2008.

UMass Library Jazz Research Links

Afro American Studies databases
This is a subset of the "Cultural and area studies" database list.

In addition to Music databases and the Library catalog, these resources of the UMass Library are useful for jazz research:

Historical Newspaper: Boston Globe This link opens in a new window
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Massachusetts' newspaper of record, 1872-1991. Additional content is added yearly.

Users must limit their search to "full text" on the left side of the screen to make sure they only get results that include the Full Text. Without the limiter, the "abstracts" will be indexed as well.
Available on campus to all, or off-campus to UMass Amherst students, staff and faculty with an UMass Amherst IT NetID (user name) and password.
Historical Newspaper: Chicago Defender This link opens in a new window
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Full-text of black weekly newspaper, with coverage from 1909-2010.
Available on campus to all, or off-campus to UMass Amherst students, staff and faculty with an UMass Amherst IT NetID (user name) and password.
Historical Newspaper: New York Times This link opens in a new window
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Full-text of The New York Times, with coverage from 1851 to three years ago.
Available on campus to all, or off-campus to UMass Amherst students, staff and faculty with an UMass Amherst IT NetID (user name) and password.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Core scholarly journals from a range of disciplines, dating from the earliest issue of each journal to a few years before present.
Available on campus to all, or off-campus to UMass Amherst students, staff and faculty with an UMass Amherst IT NetID (user name) and password.
WorldCat This link opens in a new window
The combined catalogs of most U.S. libraries.
Content is freely available for use by all.

Jazz Research Links

American Memory Project - Library of Congress
See "Performing Arts, Music"
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These collections are of special interest to jazz researchers:

African Americans ~ Sheet Music ~ 1850-1920

Jazz ~ William P. Gottlieb ~ Photographs ~ 1938-1948: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz

Sheet Music ~ 1850-1920

Variety Stage ~ Multiformat ~ 1870-1920
Institute of Jazz Studies (Rutgers University)
Library of Congress - Performing Arts Encyclopedia
Digital library of music, theater, and dance at the Library of Congress.
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Click on "Browse by subject", select "Jazz", and view 25 special collections including the collections of Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Jelly Roll Morton, Gerry Mulligan, Billy Taylor, and other jazz greats.
Princeton University Library - Jazz Research
Rutgers University Libraries - Jazz Research Guide
University of North Texas - Jazz Research Portal
William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz (Tulane University)