Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Musikey

Musikey is a bi-monthly periodical that serves as a catalog of sheet music in print. Because sheet music comes in and out of print very quickly, this publication is an indispensable resource for music stores and for libraries with extensive sheet collections like the San Francisco Public Library. We use Musikey to help us build our score and sheet music collection and to help us answer reference questions. It allows us to better search the song anthologies already in our collections, or to make referrals to other libraries and to music stores.

Musi*key Songs indexes all popular songs that are currently in print in the United States and provides a list of song anthologies that include each song. It additionally gives the songbook's price, publisher, as well as its instrumentation or arrangement--for instance for piano and voice, fakebook, easy piano, guitar tablature, etc.

Musi*key Books details all of the song anthologies currently in print, listing their contents, format (arrangement), publisher and price. It also includes an index by arrangement, i.e., by instrumentation or level of ability. There is also an index by "Personality" that lists the collections by the name of the performing artist.

We have also recently begun subscribing to a quarterly publication, Musikey Instrumental. This periodical indexes classical music sheet music that is currently in print by composer, title, and by instrumentation.

Musikey is one of a multitude of reference resources that we use to help library patron's track down sheet music. Please consult Searching for Songs at the San Francisco Public Library for more information and guidance.

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