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MUSIC 102: American Popular Music

Using Search@UW to find Music Materials at UWM

Finding a recording

If you're looking for a specific album, Rubber Soul for example, you can just search with the title. You can also do a more advanced search using the name of the performer as the "author," or add additional keywords if there's more than one album with that title.
 
To limit your results to recordings, rather than scores, articles, etc., you can use the filters in the library catalog.

 
For music recordings, use the "Audio" filter under "Resource Types." If you want to further narrow things down by format, try the following:
 
1. For streaming music, use Show Only -> Available Online.
2. For CDs, use Location -> Media & Reserve Services - Compact Discs. You can ask for these items at Media & Reserve, on the lower level.
3. For LPs, use Location -> Music Collection - Audio. You can request these through the catalog and they'll be brought to the main desk for you.
 
 
 

If you know the title of the book, article, or journal you're looking for, you can usually run a pretty simple search. If the title is a common word or phrase, though, you can try a few tricks to get better results. For example, try a search for the book The Life of Music. Typing life of music into the main search box got me over 3 million results!

To narrow things down, try:

  • -adding the author's name (Nicholas Kenyon)
  • putting the title in quotation marks, so the search algorithm treats it as a phrase
  • Using the "Resource Type" filter to limit results to just books
  • Using the "Topic" filter to narrow things down to works with music as their main subject area 

For more complicated searches, use the "Advanced Search" option. 

The Advanced Search button is next to the basic search@UW search box.

There, you can set your search type to title, author, subject, etc.

A Search type drop-down menu allows you to select which field you want to search.

You can also control whether it searches for that phrase exactly, as a starting phrase, or just contained within the results somewhere.

Select "Contains," "is (exact)", or "starts with" from a drop down menu to control how specific you want the search to be.

You can limit your search in other ways, too. If your results are bringing back a lot of materials in languages that you don't read, you can limit the search to only languages you can read.

A language drop-down menu appears in Advanced Search.

And the "Material Type" field controls format, so you can limit results to books, scores, or recordings.

The Material Type menu allows you to choose formats like Scores and Sound Recordings.