Vol. 4, no. 1 — September 1997
A New Index to Music Journals
The Music Library has acquired the International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP), an important new tool for music research. Accessible through the Electronic Library and as a stand-alone CD-ROM, IIMP indexes more than 300 music journals from twenty countries as well as music feature stories and obituaries from the New York Times and Washington Post. Its "current file" provides abstracts to 30,000 citations from 1996 forward.
IIMP also has a "retrospective file" that, at present, contains 160,000 records and completely indexes twenty-eight titles, some dating from the nineteenth-century, as well as over 100 titles from 1990-1995. Included in IIMP's retrospective file are such titles as Journal of the Folk-Song Society (1899-1931), Journal of the Royal Musical Association (1875-1990), School Music (1900-1936), and Revue Musicale (1929-1990).
A complete list of its coverage, by title and date, is available on its website. Chadwyck-Healy, IIMP's producers, also welcome recommendations for additional titles to index.
By comparison, the newly updated online version of Music Index indexes about 350 international journals and covers the years 1979 - 1995, but it does not provide abstracts. The paper version of Music Index goes back to 1949. There is no paper equivalent for IIMP. As with many new products, IIMP has its limitations, and certainly there are pitfalls to be encountered while searching. To learn more about this and other music databases, attend one of the library workshops offered on Tuesday, September 23, from 2:30 - 4:00 or Monday, October 13, from 3:00 - 4:30. Both sessions will be held in room 443A of Memorial Library.
Articles In This Issue
Streaming Audio by Geri Laudati | A New Index to Music Journals | Don't Shelve That Journal . . . by Geri Laudati | MadCat Searching for Dummies by Mark Rosa | Workshops on Music Library Resources | Recent Donors | Sowerby, Gottschalk Compositions Arrive in Donations by Steve Kurr | Recent Faculty Publications | Where Have the New Books Gone? by Mark Rosa | Mills Music Library Hours