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Rider University Libraries

MH 247 - Fall 2016 (Wilson)

Introduction to Library Resources

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources in music

 
Primary sources: manuscripts, diaries, letters, rare books, historical photographs, first-hand accounts or documentary sources on a subject, person, event or issue. "Raw materials"
  • Sheet music
  • Audio and video recordings (historic or recent)
  • Original (manuscript) music scores
  • Other documents by or about a musician or musical event (concert programs, review articles, photographs, diaries, letters, etc.)
  • Objects and equipment such as instruments, batons, etc.
     
  • Sound objects as primary sources include radio broadcasts, interviews, oral histories, broadcasts and speeches, recordings.
     

Secondary sources: one step removed from the primary source. Can include:

  • biographical works;
  • commentaries and critical reviews;
  • books other than fiction or autobiographies
  • journal, newspaper, and magazine articles written well after an event takes place

Tertiary sources:             

  • Tertiary resources provide overviews of topics by synthesizing information gathered from other resources. Tertiary resources often provide data in a convenient form or provide information with context by which to interpret it. Examples include:
  • Encyclopedias, chronologies, almanacs, textbooks

Some digitizations of primary resources:

The library catalog

Library home page

Remember: The database does not recognize capital letters or initial articles in any language. If an article is nested within a title, include it. 

Boolean operators (named after George Boole) are incorporated into database searches to broaden or narrow your set of search results. The three operators are:


AND - tells the database all elements you are searching for must be present (music AND pedagogy will have both words in all search results). NOTE: This operator is implied in many databases, including ENCORE, the library catalog at Rider University, so it is not necessary to add. 

OR - joins two or more similar concepts (try to think about two or three different concepts when constructing a search (music AND pedagogy OR teaching OR instruction, where music AND one OR all of these additional words may appear in your results).

NOT - narrows a search by excluding word and concepts (music AND pedagogy NOT freire would omit freire in the results list).

In Encore's advanced search mode, you can click on a radio button to enable the boolean operators.  

Using Encore's login feature enables you to create customized lists for all phases of your research, Including ILL.  

You will log in with your last name and your Bronc ID.

OneSearch (EDS, or Ebsco Discovery Service) cross-searches all of the library's resources, including books, scores, audio materials, videos, journal articles, and electronic resources. There will be much more material with which to deal, when executing query using OneSearch.