Virtuoso Skills for Music Enquiries

I recently went on an excellent training course run by Amelie Roper and Clemens Gresser. The course was on resources for dealing with music enquiries, and I learnt about a whole load of resources I had never come across before. I said to Clemens afterwards that it was the training session I wished I had had when I was an undergraduate music student, as it would have been so incredibly useful to me then. Ah well, now I know about them I'll just have to pass them on to future students to make sure they know more than I did!

Some of the stand out music resources included:

• Music Index journal database with citation search (hosted by EBSCO, who also host RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals, and provide a cross search feature so all three can be searched at the same time) 
• Cecilia - a database of music collections held in libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland
• Encore - union catalogue of performing sets in UK libraries
• Barbican Song Index - "an index to sheet music anthologies of popular, jazz and folk songs, songs from musicals and films, classical songs and opera arias"

A couple of very useful-looking general resources that were mentioned and I hadn't heard of before:

• List of links to UK public library catalogues
• Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK) - meta search engine for national, union and trade catalogues

By Luz Adriana Villa A. on Flickr