Databases to help both cataloguing and reference librarians with music questions

 My very first library job was working in what was called at the time the Fine and Performing Arts Department of an urban public library.  It was a sort of dream job for me because I love music, crafts, film, etc.  I eventually worked my way into doing reference work despite the fact that I lack an art or music degree.  Those were the days before the WWW and all of the free and subscription electronic resources we have today.  Besides the major music reference sources such as Groves, I doubt that any of what I used to use is still available.

From time to time I still have need of music reference resources.  Sometimes it is in the context of cataloging a music-related resource and sometimes it's in the context of answering a music-related question.  Thank goodness that my colleagues who have music degrees have made some helpful LibGuides.  Nowadays, I Google for music LibGuides and often find the answers I need.

However, there are many interesting music databases that I find often aren't found on the LibGuides.  For cataloguing popular music, for example, I often find a website called Discogs useful for looking up cover-art and tracklists to ensure that I have correctly matched an existing MARC record to the item in hand.   Given that the same album released at different times or in different countries can look quite different and sometimes have different songs on them, I used this source more than one might expect. 

If you are looking for some music databases that are often missed on the music LibGuides, I suggest looking at Wikpedia's listing of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_music_databases


While not all of these databases are free, most of them are free or have some free content.  They can be very useful for solving all sorts of music-related problems and answering patron questions.

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