Music Research Guide

Use the Boston College Libraries catalog, to find sound and video recordings. Click on "Advanced Search," select "Musical Recordings" or "video" from the Material Type drop-down menu, and enter the name of the composer and/or some words from the title of the piece in the "keyword" box.

Other tips:

• Use keywords and truncation i.e. symphon* (i.e. symphon* Bruckner)
   
• If you are not getting any results or are getting only a few results use less terms i.e. If a search for - Mozart piano concerto f major – brings up only LPs, try Mozart piano concert*, which will include the complete piano concertos
   
• If you are looking for a recording of a piece which includes a foreign word, start with a keyword search.  Click on the "Details" tab to find "the Uniform Title".  The Uniform title identifies an item if it appears under different names. To find more entries do a new keyword search using the uniform title as your search terms. For example a keyword search for Scheherazade will show that we have two LPs, but a search on the uniform title “Shekherazada” will show that we have two cds and two LPs.

If a recording is not owned by the Boston College Libraries you can request a copy in the following ways:

1. Place a request through Interlibrary Loan.  BC Library staff will borrow the recording from another library.

2. Use WorldCat to locate the recording at a library within the Boston Library Consortium, get a consortium card at the O'Neill Circulation Desk, and go to the library to borrow the recording.

3. Recommend that the recording be purchased for the library by emailing nina.bogdanovsky@bc.edu