March 2008 Update
We are delighted to announce the highly-anticipated relaunch of Grove Music Online, the cornerstone of Oxford's online music reference collection, Oxford Music Online. Over the past few years, Grove Music Online has undergone extensive technical work to improve functionality and to create a site that meets the highest possible accessibility standards. Equally important, however, are the numerous editorial changes that have been made in the process of continuing to shape and improve Grove Music Online. These changes are carefully outlined below.
Current Grove subscribers are also encouraged to read Tips for Experienced Grove Users.
Article Structure
The core content of Grove Music Online is made up of a combination of articles from several print Grove dictionaries along with articles commissioned for online and not available in print. Where articles on a single subject are available from two different print resources, these have been linked together and show as a single result in the search results page. A small icon next to the article name in the search results indicates a subject with more than one article.
Laura Macy, Editor in Chief of Grove Music Online, emphasizes that Grove Music Online is a scholarly resource that aspires to the standards of consistency and integrity set by the Grove print tradition. Maintaining these standards in a regularly updated online resource, presents a number of challenges. Among these is the best way to offer the multiple Grove dictionaries approaches to individual subjects while still retaining a single continually updated article on each subject. Our new structure, which establishes a single ‘primary’ article for all subjects in Grove will make Grove Music Online a living, regularly updated resource, while maintaining our traditional high standards of intellectual integrity. Articles on the same subject from specialist Grove Dictionaries, such as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz are available on the site through a link from the primary article. These articles are referred to as ‘archived’ because they are static articles, not subject to regular updating.
New Content
With the relaunch, a subscription to Grove Music Online will also include two of Oxford's outstanding single volume reference works on music: The Oxford Companion to Music and The Oxford Dictionary of Music, Second Edition Revised. Searched independently or together with Grove, these will offer a new short reference dimension to Grove's extensive coverage.
New Search
The launch of Oxford Music Online also includes improved searching. The advanced search and browse for both the Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Grove Music Online include subject and historical period filters tailored to suit the content of each work.
In addition to general technical improvements we have grounded the new search in authority files and taxonomies developed by the Grove editorial team and tailored to research in music.
Custom Thesaurus
Grove Music Online’s search now uses a custom OUP thesaurus based on a small selection of word variants from the OED. This thesaurus is made to be developed editorially, and we have a development plan for this. We will begin, over the next few months, by adding to the thesaurus:
- All variants of names and places used in Grove headwords.
- All variants of names, places and words from the extensive in-house style guide.
This will significantly enhance the ability to find people, places and terms under variant spellings. More importantly, variant spelling identification is now a part of our editorial programme. Every article that is commissioned or revised for Grove Music Online will have variant spellings added to the thesaurus. For these spellings we will consult the author and also such name authorities as the Library of Congress authority lists. In this way, our search capability will grow in an editorially controlled manner.
Biography Searching
Biography searching is now backed up by a taxonomy of the occupations of the music world. For example all voice types can now be searched either individually (tenor finds tenors only) or collectively (singer finds tenor, soprano, etc). A table of equivalencies (England finds English or England) and hierarchies supports the nationality search (Great Britain finds England, Scotland and Wales).
Subject Classification
The new subject classification, available for both searching and browsing, is based on the editorial areas created by Stanley Sadie and his advisors for the creation of The New Grove, second edition, this system will allow you develop subject and chronological parameters for your search. Like our other developments, this system is amenable to continuing refinement.
New partnerships
We are especially pleased to announce several new partnerships which we believe will be of great benefit to users of Grove Music Online. Subscribers to Classical Music Online or the Database of Recorded Music (DRAM) will benefit from links from Grove articles directly to those sites, allowing readers of Grove to access relevant sound recordings available through these two outstanding resources.
Grove Music Online will also include a long-anticipated partnership with the indispensable bibliographic database RILM. A link from the top of the bibliography of every article in Grove will allow readers to move from Grove's selective bibliographies to a search of the extensive content of the RILM database. At launch this is available to subscribers to RILM through OCLC, EBSCOhost, and CSA.
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
We are delighted to announce the first-ever online version of Colin Larkin's highly acclaimed Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Fourth Edition. Containing 27,000 entries and over 6,000 new entries, the online edition includes 50% more material than the Third Edition. Featuring a broad musical scope covering popular music of all genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music, the Encyclopedia also offers thousands of additional entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals.
