Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Although we all use online encyclopedias like Wikipedia for everyday information, we often skip over scholarly encyclopedias. If you're new to a topic, seeing what you can find related to a band, artist, or genre is worth seeing. Entries can provide keywords and, most helpfully, usually include a bibliography to existing sources.
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Grove Music Online This link opens in a new windowOnline music encyclopedia, offering comprehensive coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship.
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Oxford Research Encyclopedias This link opens in a new window
Designed to be an authoritative resource of reference content in a wide array of academic fields, including the humanities, social sciences, and science.
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Gale Virtual Reference Library This link opens in a new windowHandbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias in a wide range of subject areas, including Arts, Biography, Business, Education, Environment, History, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation and World, Religion, Science, and Social Sciences.
Sound Recordings
Databases
Some library-subscribed collections are below. You'll likely find more examples for contemporary music via YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music.
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Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new windowStreaming audio, liner notes, and biographical information on composers and performers.
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Naxos Spoken Word Library This link opens in a new windowContains the world's greatest literature - many classic novels, plays and poetry, from medieval times to the twenty-first century under various categories, such as Children's Classics, Classic Fiction, Shakespeare's Plays. New titles are added every month.
Sound Recordings in Search.Libraries
Use Search.Libraries and limit your search to the following content types:
- Audio Recording
- Streaming Audio
- Spoken Word Recording
News
News sources can be helpful for historical context. For music, it can give you an insight into music's reception via reviews. You may also find interviews with artists or bands. This is a small selection of news sources. Browse the A-Z database list filtered to news and newspapers for other options.
Magazines
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Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive: Music This link opens in a new windowA series of digital collections focused on 20th and 21st century music genres such as Rock, Folk, Hip-Hop, and Rap. This collection contains 1,461 issues comprising 100,696 pages and 91,441 articles. Note: Oberlin only has access to Music Magazine Archive through this platform, not the full Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive.
Newspapers
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New York Times (1851 - 2021) This link opens in a new window
Search by keywords or browse images of full pages by date.
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World News Connection (1995 - 2013) This link opens in a new windowTranslations and transcripts of news stories from non-U.S. media sources including newspaper articles, conference proceedings, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals, and non-classified technical reports. Coverage focuses on socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events. Dates of Coverage: 1995 - 2013
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Access World News This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive resource that includes a variety of news publications worldwide. These sources include major national and international newspapers, as well as local and regional titles as well as newswires, blogs, web-only content, videos, journals, magazines, transcripts and more.
Multidisciplinary Databases with News
These databases have a lot of different types of sources, including magazine and newspaper articles. Look for options to filter your results to those formats.
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.