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Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries® is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides educators, students, and interested listeners with an unprecedented variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms.

The collection includes an extraordinary array of more than 35,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds. Users browse, search, click, and then listen to the music over the Internet through their headphones or speakers. Specially developed, controlled vocabularies will enable users to browse by musical instrument, geographic area, or cultural group, among other fields.

CONTENT

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries® includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.

The collection is an outgrowth of the vision and work of Folkways Records’ founder Moses Asch, who created a veritable encyclopedia of the human experience of sound, releasing more than 2,000 albums between 1948 and 1986, including those by American folk icons such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and countless influential others. The collection also encompasses animal sounds, beer-drinking at an African homestead; calypso; classical violin instruction; drama; poetry; sounds of the deep ocean, the office, and the ionosphere; a frog being eaten by a snake; and great performances of traditional music from virtually everywhere in the world.

A TEACHING AND RESEARCH TOOL FOR ENLIVENING THE HUMANITIES

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries® offers educators and researchers a new dimension in nearly all aspects of the humanities. Here are just a few of the ways that the collection can be used to enliven topics:

• World music archives offer a cultural soundtrack that illuminates the history and literature of nations and peoples from every continent.
• Topics in history come alive with music such as with ballads from the American Revolution, War of 1812, or the American Civil War; freedom and protest songs from the Civil Rights era; songs from the Slave Coast; Canada's history in song, and much more. There are also many speeches within Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries®.
• Firsthand approaches to literature include biography, memoir, drama, and poetry. Works by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, Mahalia Jackson, Sterling Brown, and others are shared by the authors themselves, while additional works such as the ancient Greek tragedies and those by Ralph Waldo Emerson are performed by others.
• An extensively developed children's collection helps bring the world to kids from kindergarten through middle school, including a plethora of counting games, childhood songs, holiday tunes, stories, and sing-alongs from around the world.

POWERFUL SEARCH INTERFACE AND EDUCATIONAL TOOLS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

The search can be simple—e.g., show every song by Lead Belly—or complex. For example, you can search for all examples of Appalachian folk music featuring the washboard as an instrument. Or, you can search for all instances of vocal music from Oceania. Once users identify the tracks they want, they will hear their selections over the Internet through their headphones or speakers.

Users can browse lists sorted by American folk traditions, blues, bluegrass and old-time country, American Indian traditions, world traditions (by continent), jazz, classical, spoken word, sound, children’s recordings, and more.

The service incorporates three key teaching tools designed to direct students toward course-related music:

• Course Folders: Librarians and educators can organize and share course music with students in a secure and simple way. This tool can either tie in with an existing digital audio reserve or be used as a standalone access point.
• Static URLs: All Course Folders and individual recordings reside at permanent URLs that can be sent to students by email or posted to online teaching applications such as Blackboard or WebCT.
• Custom playlists: Users can create and save their own password-protected playlists.

The service expands a library's existing collection of music recordings while minimizing the problem of damaged or stolen CDs and saving shelf space. Both beginning and advanced users will want to use the service for teaching, learning, and research.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries® is available on the Web through annual subscription. The collection contains more than 35,000 tracks of audio that you can listen to on the Internet. The service works on PCs or Macs and is easy and quick to set up.

Contact sales@alexanderstreet.com or your sales representative for more information and to learn about the other collections in Music Online.