July 22nd

Music
The Music Librarian, Bob, from the Central Library was substituting at Ballard today and I learned a lot of great tips for searching for music. A patron overheard him talking about how the only sheet music store in Seattle had closed. She was a member of the Music Teacher's Association and she wanted to know where the nearest music store was. It's in Tacoma - the Ted Brown Music Store.

Finding a Musical Recording
Tips: Using General Keyword search, put in performer or song title or Opus #. Limit to All Music Recordings (then you will get CDs, cassettes, and LPs). If a song has a common word in the title like "love", make sure you ask for a modifier like "squid" :)

Mozart recordings have a "K" number. The "K" stands for Kochel (with an umlot over the "o"). Kochel cataloged all of Mozarts works in chronological order. There have been some works discovered after Kochel's cataloging but that's more than I need to know...
Similarly,
Bach's works have a "BWV" #
Hayden's works have a "HOB" #
These numbers are another way to look up recordings.

One challenge when looking up music is that there are various spellings of common words in other languages like Italian or German, especially when looking up operas or symphonies. Examples of common words would be "concerto" or "symphony". In these cases, try to enter words that would be similar in both languages like "Figaro- Mozart" Sometimes, you'll just have to do the search twice in two different languages.

You can always call the Arts, Recreation, and Literature (ARL) Department at the Central Library for help. In fact, if someone is looking for sheet music, they have a entire collection that is not in the catalog. From the 1930s to the 1950s, KOMO radio had an orchestra. When they disbanded in the 1950s they donated all of their sheet music to the library. So Seattle Public Library has a rich collection of sheet music that may not be found in the common collections of music from the 1920s to the 1950s. BUT, it's not cataloged. The patron would have to come to the Central Library to browse.

Allmusic.com
Allmusic.com is like IMDb for music. It gives descriptions of classical pieces, reviews of popular music, lists of performances, discographies, biographies, and more. If you go into the Jazz section it will list all the genres of jazz. If you put in Johann Sebastian Bach it will list all of his works, all the recordings of his works, and whether or not they are in print!

Historical Sheet Music: Online Resources
1. Music for the Nation; Library of Congress - from 1875
2. Historic American Sheet Music; Duke University - from 1920
3. Lester S. Levy Collection - from 1923 to 1960s
Sheet music from 1923 and earlier is free of copyright. The first two sites you can download the sheet music. The Lester Levy collection will only give citations.

Encyclopedias
A patron came up and said she would like to know how gasoline is made. All of the computers were in use and I was waiting for one to be freed up. The patron asked if the Encyclopedia would have an answer! Of course! Before the internet I would have instinctively gone to the encyclopedia! So we went over to World Book Encyclopedia and started with "O" for oil refinery. That referred us to "P" for petroleum which had an entry on how gasoline is made. She was OK with that, but if she had wanted more we could have taken key words out of the encyclopedia entry to find books on the same subject. Or, if a computer had been available I could have used the online databases to find an online encyclopedia :)

Spanish? or French?
A patron had just watched the movie "Around the World in 80 Days" and wanted to know the translation of the character named "Passepartout". She thought it was a Spanish word. Bob went to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and looked up the movie. Then he went to the cast of characters. Passepartout looked like a french word, so he went to the French/English dictionary and found the meaning: "For all occasions" The twist with this search is that if we had gone with the patron's guess that it was a Spanish word, we would never have found it!

Reluctant Reader's Advisory
A mother came up with her two sons and asked if we had any of R.L. Stine's Rotten School series. She said that they had really got her one son reading the previous summer. It turned out that he had read all of the ones we had in the collection. Other titles that were popular with her son were the Baseball Card Adventure series by Dan Gutman(Babe and Me, etc.); Sideways Stories from Wayside School series by Louis Sachar; Travis & Freddy's Adventures in Vegas by Henry Johnson; and non-fiction books about Dragons. This boy liked to listen to books on tape.

American Girls
Another mother came up to the desk with her daughter. She was looking for Addy's Surprise by Connie Porter in the American Girls Collection. This girl was hard to recommend books for because she had read everything we suggested and one that she hadn't read, her mother had deemed inappropriate for her daughter. The book the mother objected to was The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich, but she wasn't clear why she objected to it. Other books the girl had read were: Little House on the Prairie, Gail Carson Levine's Princess books, and Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy and Tacy books. The mother and daughter finally were happy with Because of Winn Dixie.

Another reader's advisory: Greek gods - fiction for kids.
Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence
The Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan
This was hard to look for. I kept on coming up with books in the 398s instead of just fiction.