Music
Locate citations and selected abstracts for articles and reviews of books, dissertations, recordings, and scores, that are featured in music periodicals. All music-related disciplines are covered. For 1948 through 1969 citations, use the Music Index in print annual volumes at the Music Library's Table 7.
Music Magazine Archives, a collection of magazines focused on rock, folk and hip-hop published from the late 1960s to the present features cover-to-cover scanned images, including advertisements, plus searchable text. It provides a view into music, popular culture, music journalism, and social and political transition in the late 20th century.
RBP collects full-text articles from music industry publications for multiple genres of popular music including grunge, rap, hip hop, reggae, Latin, rock, electronica, girl groups, jazz, and more. Audio interviews are occasionally included.
Use the RILM database to identify both in-depth and interdisciplinary writing about music. Conference reports, journal articles, festschriften, book chapters, recordings, critical editions, and reviews, are indexed and described in detail. RILM’s access is comprehensive for the current half-century and, increasingly, is expanding back well into the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Music Periodicals Database features citations and selected full text of many (though by no means all) music periodicals. The database includes a number of music trade journals and magazines as well as referred scholarly music journals. Also includes a small selection of eBooks.
Boston Public Library (BPL) has a subscription to the Rolling Stone Archive, which contains the complete backfile of Rolling Stone, from its launch in 1967 to 2018. BPL eCards are available to anyone who lives, resides part-time to attend school, owns property, or works in Massachusetts.
Literature
Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
Searching Across Disciplines
BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
Academic Search Premier contains indexing, abstracts and full-text articles for scholarly publications, most of them peer-reviewed. The subjects covered include topics in the social sciences, humanities, general science, education and most areas of academic study.
This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles.
This database is a core general science resource, covering all aspects of scientific literature. It also has a number of tools that make it a unique resource for finding scholarly literature. Item records come with links both to the works cited by the paper in question and the future works that cite that paper. Web of Science also allows the user to set up email alerts for specific authors or topics, provides researcher profiles, and to use associated journal metrics provided by the vendor.
Some of our older periodicals are only available on microfilm. It is likely that a search for articles on musicians and groups from the 1970s and 1980s will pull up citations to articles that we have access to, but only on microfilm.
In the example below I did a search for The Pogues in The Music Index.
I then clicked on the button to see whether we had the periodical, Rolling Stone. My results, below, indicated that we had the title, but the year I wanted was in microfilm. In order to read the article, I would go down to the Basement to Microfilms, located this title by call number, and read the article on a microfilm reader.