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DANC/MUSC 010 : Dance & Music: a Social Dialogue (SC)
Finding Background Information:
International encyclopedia of dance
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press, 1998.
This six-volume set is a great starting point for dance research. It contains articles on choreographers, dancers, dance terms, different countries from around the world, stories of ballets, and dance notation as well as bibliographies.
Grove Music Online
Comprised of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Extensive articles with excellent bibliographies.
The Garland encyclopedia of world music
Publisher: New York : Garland Pub., 1998-c2002.
An excellent ten-volume set covering world music and dance that includes audio examples and bibliographies.
Ethnomusicology, Folk Music, and World Music
Compiled by the University of Washington; a good jumping off point for internet exploration in ethnomusicology.
Society of Dance History Scholars’ Online Resources
Includes links to websites of general interest as well as websites relevant to specific periods of dance history and specific genres of dance.
Finding Recordings, Scores, and Books:
Naxos Music Library
Includes the complete Naxos, Marco Polo and Da Capo commerical sound recording catalogues of over 75,000 tracks, including Classical music, Historical recordings, Jazz, World, Folk and Chinese music. Listeners can read notes on the works being played as well as biographical information on composers or artists.
Smithsonian Global Sound
Offers almost the entire Folkways and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings collections and the holdings of two regional archives: the International Library of African Music (ILAM), in Grahamstown, South Africa, and the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), in New Delhi, India. Try browsing by geographic area narrowed by instrument type.
Tripod, the Tri-College Library Catalog
Use Tripod (shared with Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges) to find recorded performances of the works you want to explore and to find books and essays on your topic. Here are some searching hints:
- Keyword Searches: Start with words used to describe your topic. Try a variety of words and include the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT to explore many possibilities.
- Subject Headings Searches: Tripod uses Library of Congress subject headings. They are not always intuitive. For example the official term for movies or films is "motion pictures". Instead of starting with a subject heading search you may want to start with a keyword search. Browse through the list of results until you find something that looks relevant to your research. Click on the link and look through the description of the item to find "official" library terminology for the topic. You can then click on the links in Tripod labeled, "Subject".
- Uniform Titles: Library catalogs have a way to group titles together no matter what words or languages are printed on the title page. To catch all performances of a work you will want to search by the uniform title. Start with a keyword search such as "Tchaikovsky and sleeping beauty". Browse through the list of results until you find the work you are interested in. Click on the link and look through the description of the item to find "official" title for the work, for example, "Spiashchaia krasavitsa" is the uniform title for Sleeping Beauty.
- Limiting Searches: You can limit searches in two ways. Before you begin searching you can choose a specialized search such as "Videos/DVDs" or "Music". Also, after getting search results you can click on the "limit/sort search" button or the "modify search" button to refine your results.
Tri-College Dance Videos
An alphabetical listing created from a real time catalog search. Please note that Underhill Videos are intershelved with books.
The JVC video anthology of world music and dance
Publisher: [Tokyo] : JVC, Victor Company of Japan [1990]
Production: Produced in collaboration with the National Museum of Ethnology (Osaka) and Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings.
Tri-College World Music Recordings
Non-western and folk music at Swarthmore and Haverford arranged geographically.
New York Public Library Dance Collection Catalog
The Dance Catalog lists works about all forms of dance, from all cultures, in print and other media. It includes materials in many languages and serves as an index to an international range of dance periodicals. The New York Public Library's catalog will help you identify materials that can be requested through interlibrary loan.
WorldCat
This is a gigantic catalog of materials owned by libraries all over the world listing books, journals, scores, sound recordings, videos, websites, and manuscript collections. WorldCat will help you identify materials that can be requested through interlibrary loan.
Finding Journal Articles:
Because your papers will be approached from a number of different angles, the databases listed below represent a variety of disciplines. When you identify items of interest, try using the “FIND IT” link to help you get your hand on the cited item or search Tripod under "title" or "journal title" to see if the items are held within the Tri-Colleges. If something you need is not available on Swarthmore’s campus then it can be requested through our interlibrary loan services.
ProQuest Research Library:
Provides online access to an extensive collection of full-text articles from journals across a wide range of subject areas. The advanced search mode is very flexible and allows for many ways to narrow a search including a limit to just performance reviews. Coverage is from 1971 to the present.
RILM abstracts of music literature
Provider: CSA
The premier index for scholarly music research with over 200,000 citations on international music corresponding to the printed RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. This file is produced by the Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale. From 1969 to the present.
International Index to Music Periodicals
Indexes and summarizes articles in over 400 journals and includes full text for 83 of these. Some indexing goes back as far as 1874.
International Index to the Performing Arts
Indexes and summarizes articles in over 210 journals and includes full text for over 50 of these. Some indexing goes back as far as 1864.
Arts & humanities citation index
Provider: ISI
A multidisciplinary database covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities with selected, relevant items from major science and social science journals. References to and from journal articles can also be searched. Swarthmore has access to the AHCI from 1975 to the present through Web of Science.
Anthropology Plus
Provides indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. From the late 19th century to the present.
Evaluating Sources:
Scholarly Journals vs. Popular Magazine Articles (USTA Library)
This page compares the two types of publications on several levels, including language, structure of articles, editorial procedures, and credits.
Evaluating Information Found on the Internet (Johns Hopkins University Library)
Discusses the criteria by which scholars in most fields evaluate print information, and shows how the same criteria can be used to assess information found on the Internet.
Citing Sources:
Guidelines for style and the documentation of sources for scholarly papers in music and dance follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. The manual is not available online but thorough explanations can be found in the Chicago/Turabian Documentation section of the UW-Madison Writing Center website. Citing the notes that accompany sound recordings and scores can be tricky. Williams College has a good citation guide for non-book formats.