Digital media reviews.(Product/service evaluation)

For information regarding the scope of this column, consult the headnote in the September 2007 issue (p. 117 of this volume). The dales of access for each review of an online source indicate the dates during which the reviewer was evaluating the resource. All Web sites were last accessed 20 February 2008.

Index to Printed Music: Collections & Series (IPM). Published by National Information Services Corporation (NISC). Databases licensed from James Adrian Music, http://biblioline.nisc.com/scripts/login .dllPNoIP (Accessed November-December 2007) [Requires an Internet connection and a Web browser; annual subscription pricing (2008 price): $925 for single concurrent user access; also available: 2-5 users, 6-10 users, unlimited users; access: IP filtering, URL referral or User ID/Password.]

Finding specific compositions published in collected editions, monuments of music, historical sets, or other sets or series that contain multiple pieces has been a difficult task for decades. The first major resource to help with this undertaking was Anna Harriet Heyer's Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Momunents of Music: A Guide to Their Contents (hereafter cited as Heyer), the first edition published in 1957, the 3rd and last in 1980. All three editions of this vital work were issued by the American Library Association. Although collected editions, monuments, and the like continued to come out after the last edition of Heyer, most of them were not indexed in any centralized place; there was no good way to find the individual pieces these newer publications contained. The works lists of The New Grove Dictionary of Music anil Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1st ed., 1980; 2nd ed., 2001; online, 2001-; http://www.grovemusic.com) filled the lacuna in part, particularly for collected works of major composers. Between the first and second editions of the New Grove came the book Collected- Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: A Bibliography, by George R. Hill and Norris L. Stephens (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1997; hereafter cited as Hill), which was a promising successor to Heyer but was of limited use in its printed form. According to its preface, this book is a "list of important editions of historically significant music" and includes "the most significant series and sets." A computerized index to Hill was envisioned from the start. Index to Printed Music (IPM) is that long-awaited index. Indeed, it is not an index to be used in conjunction with the book; rather it is the book in searchable database form, considerably augmented by similar data for additional, more recent publications, and more detailed information about the contents of the publications listed in Hill. Many composers' collected sets are represented in Hill by a single listing for the set without any detail on the contents; it is not possible to determine from Hill which volume contains a given work. IPM indexes the content of those collected sets, thereby enabling users to access them more easily. IPM also includes some more detailed indexing of works published as groups. For example, volume one of Sixteenth-century Madrigal (Jessie Ann Owens, ed., New York: Garland, 1987-96) contains madrigals by Jachet de Berchem. Hills book includes one listing under the series title and one under Berchem's name with a collective title. In addition to these, IPM includes twenty-seven listings for individual madrigals with distinctive titles. This is clearly an improvement in access over the printed version.

A Product Factsheet on 1PM is included within the resource and is also available directly from the NISC Web site (http://www .nisc.com/Frame/ NlSC_products-f.htm). Here the resource is called the only electronic title for finding individual pieces of music printed in standard scholarly editions. This statement is true. It is the only such electronic resource. If one looks at reference resources in general, however, the staictneut needs qualification; one cannot rely entirely on IPM to Find scores in monuments and the like. Perhaps the resource's most important limitation is an unstated one: on the chronological boundaries of" the index. IPM begins where Hill's book began. Like the book, it does not cover some older publications that are indexed in Heyer. This chronological limitation is made explicit in the book's preface. It is not mentioned in the explanatory material on the Web site of IPM or NISC, but perhaps it should be; it would fit quite well in the Product Factsheet. Once one is alerted to this limitation, it is the work of only a few minutes to locate sets indexed by Heyer that are not included in Hill or IPM. On the ...