Music

Grove Music Online
Grove Music Online, available through Oxford Music Online, is a fully-searchable online encyclopedia that covers all aspects of the history of music, with articles about composers (including lists of works), performers, styles and genres, countries and cities, and instruments. Grove Music Online contains the New Grove Dictionaries of Opera, Jazz, Musical Instruments, American Music, and the 29-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Encyclopedia of Popular Music
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, from Oxford Music Online, covers popular music of all genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music.

Rock's Backpages
Rock's Backpages is a full-text online library of rock music journalism published since 1960, including reviews, interviews, and features on artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top, from over 100 of the most influential magazines and newspapers, including Cashbox, Creem, Crawdaddy!, Melody Maker, Mojo, Spin, Uncut, and Vibe.

International Index to Music Periodicals
Indexes articles in over 375 music periodicals. Abstracts are provided for articles indexed since 1996, and the full text of articles in 42 journals is provided since 1997. Additionally, IIMP indexes articles in over 100 journals going back to 1990 and earlier.

RILM Abstracts
Indexes and abstracts literature about music from 1969 to the present, including periodical articles, Festschriften articles, books, reviews, and dissertations. Scope is international, but all abstracts are in English.

Music Index Online
Indexes articles in 670 international music journals and magazines, from 1979 to the present.

RIPM: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800-1950)
Indexes articles in over 50 periodicals published in 15 countries during the nineteenth century.

Many libraries at Penn State have collections of sheet music (scores and performance parts). Pattee Library at the University Park campus has a collection of over 30,000 scores and parts (located on the second floor of West Pattee), which are available to all Penn State library users via the I Want It button in The CAT, the library's online catalog.

Scores are organized on the shelves according to the Library of Congress Classification. Click here to see an outline of this shelf arrangement.

Click here for help finding sheet music in the library’s online catalog, The CAT.

You can stream music directly to your laptop, desktop, or handheld device from music audio databases provided by the library. Click here for more information!

Most libraries at Penn State have collections of sound recordings (especially CDs), ranging in size from several hundred at many campus libraries to 13,000 CDs in the Music and Media Center of Pattee Library on the University Park campus. A broad range of music is represented, including jazz, classical, folk, and popular. All sound recordings are available to all Penn State library users via the I Want It button in The CAT, the library's online catalog. 

Click here for help finding sound recordings in the library’s online catalog, The CAT.

Most libraries at Penn State have collections of videos, both DVDs and videocassettes, ranging in size from several hundred to over a thousand (for example, the libraries at Penn State Altoona, Penn State Erie, Penn State Fayette, Penn State Harrisburg, Penn State York, as well as the Media Technology and Support Services on the University Park campus, each have over one thousand DVDs). The Music and Media Center in Pattee Library on the University Park campus has over 4,000 DVDs. All videos are available to all Penn State library users via the I Want It button in The CAT, the library's online catalog.

Click here for help finding videos in the library's online catalog, The CAT.

Dissertations & Theses
Indexes and abstracts 1.4 million doctoral dissertations from over 1000 North American and European universities, since 1851. Abstracts are available for dissertations since 1980.

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology-Online
International database of bibliographic descriptions of completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines.