Audio Resources Online

The University of Oregon Libraries subscribes to a number of databases for online audio resources which include access to music, speeches, sound effects, and other audio recordings. The recordings included in these databases are complete tracks and may be played on your computer as you view the resources. These sites are only available for access by University of Oregon faculty, staff and students, unless you are in one of the University of Oregon's libraries. While no tracks may be downloaded to your machine for copying, many of the databases provide fee-based access to commercial databases for downloading. These resources often offer access to faculty for producing audio course folders.

Online Audio Resources:

University- subscribed audio databases:

• African American Song
  African American Song is the first online resource to document the history of African American music in an online music listening service. The collection contains a diverse range of genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and narratives. It also includes a few spoken word recordings.
  This source currently features some 16,000 tracks of great historical recordings from Document Records. This great collection features recordings from the first half of the 20th century and includes iconic artists such as The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Memphis Minnie, Blind Willie McTell and Huddie Ledbetter. It provides a rich source of Blues and early Jazz recordings as well as a lot of sacred music.

• American Song
  American Song is a history database that will contain 50,000 tracks that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database will include songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. This release includes 763 albums, equaling 12,542 tracks.

• Classical Music Library
  Classical Music Library provides online listening to over 10,000 pieces of the classical repertoire, ranging from Medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas and the avante-garde.
  You can search the database by composer, performer (including ensemble and conductor), title of the piece, as well as browse by era and genre.
  Record labels whose works are included in this database include most of the contemporary recordings of EMI Classical, as well as a larger number of the important classical recording companies, such as Hyperion, Bridge, Hanssler Classic, and Vox.
  As with the Smithsonian Global Sound and the African American Song databases, faculty can create class folders that enable them to put selected recordings from these databases on their Blackboard sites for course reserves.

• Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM)
  This source is dedicated to American music research, with over 7500 compositions in its database. It includes the archives of the New World Recordings, with musical genres from folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, and electronic music.
  DRAM also includes the recordings of Composers Recordings Inc., which specializes in contemporary composers' recordings. Other labels that are part of this rich resource include Albany, innova, Cedille, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening and Mutable.
  Alongside the high quality music streams, complete liner notes, scholarly essays, bibliographies and discographies are available for viewing on the Database. Playlists can be created by faculty to connect with their Blackboard and class web sites.

• Smithsonian Global Sound
  Smithsonian Global Sound is produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions.
  It includes the published recordings owned by the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) as well as material collected on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology.
  The database includes resources such as speeches, sound effects, music from all over the world, classical music recordings (especially American composers) and resources for language courses.
  Searching the database can be done in a number of ways: by genre, by country, by cultural group, by language, instrument, artist, ensemble, and by album label.
  Faculty also have the option to create course folders of audio sounds, to supplement their Blackboard or course web sites. [To get an official Course Folder, please contact the music librarian (lbennett@uoregon.edu)]

Reserve Audio Listening Possibilities:

Along with the traditional audio reserve capabilities of the Douglass Listening Room (3rd floor of the Knight Library), the UO Libraries are currently providing access to reserve audio resources through the Douglass Listening Room and the Streaming Media Services. Faculty who want to put streaming audio resources on their Blackboard sites may contact the Douglass Room supervisor (Terry McQuilkin, tmcq@uoregon.edu) to make arrangements for items owned by the Library's Douglass Listening Room to be digitized and prepared for their sites. (If the item(s) you wish to have put on reserve are from your personal collection, please let us know the bibliographic information so that we can attempt to purchase a copy for our library.)
In addition, faculty can request a Course Folder site for sharing items from our audio databases (with the exception of DRAM)on their Blackboard sites. Requests for course folders can be addressed to Leslie Bennett (at lbennett@uoregon.edu).

Future Developments in Online Audio Resources:

Part of the mission of the University Libraries is to track the resources available to scholars in audio technology. We will be adding resources and information to this page to assure access to these invaluable sources for research.

If you have suggestions of audio resources you think the University should know about, please contact Leslie Bennett, at lbennett@uoregon.edu.

Maintained by: Leslie Bennett, lbennett@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 02/05/2008