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Finding musical works

A guide for library employees and others who may have to find a specific work .

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Reminder: Online Access

  • Library resources require going through CWRU Single Sign-On.
  • The best method is to follow links from the library website.
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Using the catalog

How do I access the catalog? And what is it?

"The catalog" is essentially a database of all the items that we own. This can be accessed in several different ways. Note that we share our catalog utility with CIM, CIA and the Rock Hall, so you will find things that are not available or not easily available to our students. Rock Hall items do not circulate and must be used onsite.

1. "The catalog" can be accessed from catalog.case.edu. This is what users are thinking of when they hear "the catalog."

As a sample search, set the search to "Author" and type in "Tchaikovsky".

You will see that some records point to something else: "See..."  and the "something elses" are hyperlinked.

The first thing you'll see is a record for "Tchaikovsky", just Tchaikovsky. This links to brief records that were created in the prehistory of the electronic catalog. You may ignore them. Next, you will see a bunch of other Tchaikovskys: Andre, Leslie, Modest, and Peter. There are several variant forms for Modest and Peter, which point to something hyperlinked in blue. That's an authority record (see Uniform Titles tab for how these work.) You will notice one record with a huge number of records. That's what you want. Composers tend to have more records than usual, because they typically write many works, and those works are available in many different iterations.

Now, make it easy on yourself, go to "Limit/sort search" in the middle of the top and choose "music scores".  All the other Tchaikovskys go away, and you're left with the composer. This may seem odd, because Andre is also a composer, but his Authorized Access Point is Tchaikowsky, with a "w". Odder yet, Modest, who was Peter's brother and sometime librettist, is spelled "Chaĭkovskiĭ, Modest" because he doesn't have an English name that everybody knows, so he defaults to the favored form of Cyrillic transliteration. Selecting "scores" will also get rid of things with no musicians involved.  I would generally advise against filtering for Kulas; if something is only available at CIM, you want to be able to tell patrons that. Then scroll down until your title appears. You have to go through ALL the "1812"s and other uniform titles. Skipping to various result pages speeds this up. Another option, instead of scrolling through the numeric/alphabetical list of titles, is to search more precisely by once again using the ‘limit/sort search’ function. At the bottom of that page, look for the ‘enter limits’ box. Suppose you want to find out if Kulas has a score of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. Here you have an option to enter a word or words found in the title of the piece you’re looking for, such as ‘Rococo’. Click ‘submit’, and your search should yield a much more precise list of results.

2. Through the "Catalog" function in Sierra.
This is not available to the general public online. Its main purpose is to edit records. DO NOT EDIT THE RECORDS. In some ways, this is the simplest, most elegant form of the catalog. It's better to use the regular catalog, because you can see what the patron sees. But sometimes this can be faster or more convenient.

First, type your author into the author box in the left corner (make sure you've pulled down to "author")  Selecting "scores" will get rid of things with no musicians involved (useful for telling one Smith from another) and will get rid of all the authority records for individual titles (which hang out at the beginning of the list). Then pull down until your title appears. Note that in this interface, ONLY uniform titles appear.  For a Russian composer, this can be problematic. On the other had, they're all clustered together, so you don't have to scroll through them. Also, this is an opus-level catalog. If you're looking for "None but the lonely heart", you're better off using a word search on author and title, which recovers various iterations of "Romansy, op. 6. Net, tolʹko tot, kto znal".

3. Discovery. The use of Discovery/EDS for finding scores is not recommended, because the things that make it such a powerful tool in finding general information actually make it harder/slower to find a specific item. It can be done, but why?

Remember: having searched the catalog, if you can't find something, tell the user, "I can't find what you're looking for. The librarian will be back at [time], and they can help you find this". We'll check different forms of content, online databases, OhioLink etc.  There is always a way for the patron to get what they need.