Music in Australia

The National Library of Australia has launched a new site for exploring the music of Australia. It's available at http://www.musicaustralia.org/ . This site has both a search component and a browse component.

The search box is in the middle of the main page. You can do a simple keyword search and specify where you want to find information -- online-only or not -- and the kinds of information for which you're looking: scores, multimedia, sounds, Web sites, pictures, moving images, people, and more.

I searched for march, limiting my search to online only but in no other way. I got 440 results, which listed what kind of result it was (score, picture, sound, etc.); title, artist, and date; what the entry consists of (pages, MP3, etc.), and the collection in which it is located.

Clicking on the sheet music entry for "The Australian colonists' song" took me to a page of information about the item, including notes, publication date, subject, language, and cataloging information. Unfortunately the link to the JPG of the sheet music took me to a 404 error. Bummer.

I went back and searched for march again, limiting my results to sound and multimedia. I got two results, one a march that I could download as an MP3 file, and one a catalog entry for a record from an Australian classical music label that was not available from the catalog entry.

If you'd rather not search, you may browse using the nav on the left. Actually it all takes you to the same page, which takes you to a list of the items available: 76072 Scores (about 10% of which are online), 35066 Sound recordings (of which only about 500 are online), 19149 Books and theses (184 of which are online), etc.

In addition to the search and item lists, this site also has a set of sixteen special collections related to Australian music (called "themes") as well as a link to other related services offered by the National Library of Australia and affiliated organizations.

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