Using the Napier Library catalogue to find music

Subject Areas

• Art in General
• Culture, Literature, Publishing
• Design
• Film
• Journalism, Advertising, Communication
• Music
• Photography

Our Library Catalogue is at http://nuin.napier.ac.uk/F

You will automatically enter the Search/Browse screen.

SIMPLE SEARCHING

Type your keywords into the first box

• Leave the next box set to Word(s) anywhere. This allows you to look for words anywhere in the significant details of an item.

• You can combine word(s) from the title with word(s) from the name of the author or composer.

• This is a very quick and efficient way to search.
• If you do this you must make sure Words adjacent is set to No.
• You can also add the word “score” or “CD” or video to an All fields search
• You can put in numbers, such as Opus nos., or thematic catalogue numbers, e.g. KV for Mozart, BWV for Bach.

• If you want to search for a topic, but don't know the author or title of any books, try searching by Title Words using any words you think might be in the title.

OTHER SEARCHES

• If you want to search for title words as a phrase (i.e. together and in that order) click Yes for Words adjacent.

• Instead of Word(s) anywhere you can use the drop-down menu to change it to search different fields, such as Author/Name (includes composers) or Subject

• Further down the screen you can limit your search by Format - e.g. Score, Audio Recording, Journal or DVD/Video or by Library e.g. items at Craighouse only select from the drop-down menus

• If you want to search for other kinds of materials again after this, you will need to change your limit back to All

• Look at the Search Tips at the top right of the screen for more help on searching

Remember that music titles are often in foreign languages, e.g. String quartet, Quartette, Streichquartett, and the spellings can vary – Cantata, Kantaten etc. If you want to find everything you have you need to cover all the options.

Sometimes a more efficient way of searching is to truncate (i.e. shorten) your word, so that you can find all words that are longer all at once. In NUIN you can do this with a question mark:

e.g. Cantat? finds cantata, cantatas Kantat? finds Kantata, Kantaten, Kantatenwerk etc.

MAJOR COMPOSERS

If you want to see everything by Haydn, Joseph, for example, you will find a large number of items. Obviously you can add keywords to narrow this down, another way to reduce the size of the list is to type CDS or Scores as part of your search. Make these plurals to catch as much as possible.

You may find the list is still quite long. There are more things you can do to make it more manageable.

• The list appears in date order, with the most recent items first

• you can sort the list into a more convenient order:

click on the underlined words in the blue bar to sort by Author or Format (e.g. music material) or Title

This might be enough to help you find the item you need – click Next Page to see more titles.

You can use the Jump to boxes to go straight to a particular item in the list, or to the first instance of a word in the list as you have sorted it out.

FINDING TYPES OF MUSIC

We have separate sections for Scores, Miniature Scores and Oversize Scores.

Miniature Scores are normally orchestral or choral works for study purposes, and will give you the complete work, with all the orchestral/choral parts.

Scores will generally be music that might be used for performance, so keyboard music, songs, music for one or two instruments and piano, vocal scores (no orchestral parts).

Oversize scores may be either!

We shelve our printed music and recordings in composer order, by popular request.

This means that you need to use the catalogue if you want to find music for organ, flute quartet, string quintet, piano duet etc.

• To do this, choose Subject …..contains word(s) from the Field to Search box

• Type flute? Quartet? (the Subject Index uses plurals so it is best always to truncate words using the question mark)

• You will get a list of the relevant items

• As before, you can sort them into a different order, and you can limit to music only

• This search is also useful for finding subjects like jazz, popular music, blues

THEMATIC CATALOGUE NUMBERS FOR MAJOR COMPOSERS

e.g. if you know the Koechel Verzeichnis (KV) no. for a piece by Mozart, or the BWV no. for Bach

You can find these by doing keyword searches as above, but here is another way to browse through the numbers.

• choose Title ….begins with form the Fields to Search box

• To search for the BWV nos. for Bach’s works type BWV and click Go

• You will see the beginning of the list

• You can type the whole number instead, e.g. BWV 1000 and the list will begin at that point

• This will work for other composers, such as D (Schubert), K (Scarlatti), KV (Mozart), or Hob. (Haydn).