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Digital media reviews.

Article Excerpt
This quarterly column offers reviews of music resources in a variety of digital media, excluding any in purely digital audio format that would normally be reviewed as sound recordings. This includes CD-ROM products, World Wide Web sites, online subscription services and databases, and music-related software of any kind. This may include both free and fee-based resources. Some reviews may cover a number of related sources together. The dates 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 to verify availability on 23 May 2008.

Google Book Search. Google Inc. http://books.google.com/. (Accessed December 2007-March 2008) [Requires a Web browser and an Internet Connection.]

Live Search Books. Microsoft Corporation. http://books.live.com. (Accessed December 2007-March 2008) [Requires a Web browser and an Internet Connection.] [N. B. In May 2008, as this review was going to press, Microsoft cancelled the Live Search Books project. Content from the project is to be incorporated into Live Search results, but there will be no further digitization and no separate interface. See http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down .aspx for details.]

Google Book Search and Live Search Books are making the full text of books available to anyone with access to the Internet. The two are differentiated by their approaches to finding books, and to searching within them. Google takes a librarian's approach to the problem: they provide a lot of information and multiple ways to access it. This allows for incredible precision in searching. Microsoft takes a consumer's approach, with a smaller amount of information, but with a focus on legibility and browseability. This lends itself towards a more populist form of access.

The Google Book project is the larger of the two, and it now includes the books of almost twenty major research libraries, as well as content supplied by publishers. Live Search Books is a significantly smaller project, with books drawn from far fewer universities and publishers. Another major difference between the two is transparency. In its "Help" pages, Google provides information about who is contributing (although they do not state what they are contributing); the philosophy behind the project; and how the company views the copyright issues. This transparency follows all the way through to the somewhat flexible design of the search interface itself. Live Search makes none of this help information easily available from the search pages. Microsoft's product, while being much more opaque, nonetheless has some promising features.

PRESENTATION

While both databases have wide subject scopes, this review is concerned only with the music-related content. When approaching either collection, it is important to remember that a majority of the fully-accessible texts will be those in the public domain (published before 1923). Depending on the wishes of the authors and publishers, works still...

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