Music and Arts: Music & Arts on the web

• Subject guides A-Z
• Drill Hall Library website
• Library catalogue

The Golden Pages provide announcements for forthcoming conferences in musicology and related disciplines, an archive of dissertation abstracts, links to music departments worldwide, and other links of interest to musicologists.

Visit the Golden Pages.

Have a go at this multiple choice quiz compiled by the BBC and test your fake news spotting skills. It's harder than you think!

Did you know that the BBC has extensive guidelines for their reporters, which they must follow to check the authenticity and accuracy of news stories. The relevant part of the website is BBC Editorial Guidelines section 3 - accuracy.

Click the image to play!

• Royal Academy of Music: Museum and Library Collections: Visit the Royal Academy of Music Museum to explore unique instruments, manuscripts and art, and discover behind-the-scenes stories from the United Kingdom's oldest conservatoire.


• Cecilia : An online guide to music collections in archives, libraries and museums in the UK and Ireland.

Universities will have their own digital repository to store, provide access to and preserve work produced by their academics. These repositories can be a valuable source of information to you when you are writing a dissertation or postgraduate-level project. 

The three universities at the Medway site each have their own repository which you can explore:

• University of Greenwich - GALA.
• University of Kent - KAR.
• Canterbury Christ Church University - Research Space Repository.

The internet can be one of the most valuable tools in your quest for information during your time at university.

However, with so much information out there, it can be very hard to find the best information, or to know that you've found it when you've got it!

Use the ideas on this page to find useful sites full of good-quality information for the arts.

• 120 Years of Electronic Music : Covers electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990, focusing mainly on those in use before the 1960's. The site includes a series of articles on historical electronic musical instruments, with illustrations. There is a bibliography and also links to related sites.


• Acoustical Society of America : An international scientific society founded in 1929 and dedicated to increasing and diffusing the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications.


• Audio Engineering Society : Site gives the full-text of some technical reports into various aspects of audio engineering, the table of contents of the Society's journal and details of other publications.


• Daphe Oram: Music Pioneer : Daphne Oram (1925 - 2003) is one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Site funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

• Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music : ABRSM is the UK's largest music education body, one of its largest music publishers and the world's leading provider of music exams, holding over 650,000 assessments in more than 90 countries every year.


• Arts Council England : Works to get great art to everyone by championing, developing and investing in artistic experiences that enrich people's lives. As the national development agency for the arts, they support a range of artistic activities from theatre to music, literature to dance, photography to digital art, carnival to crafts.


• British Council for Arts : Working across many areas of music and art. They work with our overseas network of arts managers and partners to plan, resource, deliver and evaluate high-impact arts projects involving professional artists and organisations from the UK.


• Incorporated Society of Musicians : The UK's professional body for musicians. Championing the importance of music and protecting the rights of those working within music through a range of services, campaigns, support and practical advice.


• International Alliance for Women in Music : IAWM is a global network of women and men working to increase and enhance musical activities and opportunities and to promote all aspects of the music of women.


• International Association of Music Libraries : (IAML, UK and Ireland branch), exists to represent and promote the interests of music librarians and libraries, music–related archives and music information providers throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.


• International Computer Music Association : An international affiliation of individuals and institutions involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music. It serves composers, engineers, researchers and musicians who are interested in the integration of music and technology.


• Perfoming Rights Society for Music : Music wouldn't exist without the work of songwriters, composers and publishers. The PRS is here to represent them and ensure that they are rewarded for their creations.


• Society for Music Analysis : British organisation dedicated to the theory and practice of music analysis. Music scholars, students and others who share an interest in theoretical and analytical aspects of music make up its membership. The website gives information on events such as study days and conferences, access to the biannual newsletter going back to Issue number One (April, 1992) and information on the journal Music Analysis.


• Sound and Music : Promotes challenging contemporary music and sound art through a range of projects, incorporating live events, learning, artist development, and digital platforms.

• Choral Public Domain Library : Containing over 6,000 pieces of music.


• Sheet music at Project Gutenberg Volunteers from Project Gutenberg have been engaging in digitizing public domain sheet music, using a variety of techniques, to enable study and performance. For the most part, the musical pieces created have been chamber music, with composers such as Brahms and Beethoven.


• The Mutopia Project : Offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others.


• IMSLP : International Music Score Library Project, also known as Petrucci Music Library.


• Encore Catalogue of Performance Sets : The database gives the names of public libraries as the name of the local authority. Libraries of other institutions appear under the name of the institution. Addresses and contact details are not given as these change frequently; users are recommended to search for the website of the library in question for these.

• BBC Archive : Offers themed collections of radio and TV programmes, documents and photographs. Explore who we are and see how attitudes have changed over the years through selections from an archive which began over 70 years ago. Collections include; the Berlin Wall, World War II, Coal Mining in Britain, The Birth of the NHS and Working Class Life.


• BFI Inview : A unique resource which offers a window on Britain's changing political, economic and social landscape in the age of film and television (open to everyone associated with UK universities).


• BFI Screenonline : A free online encyclopaedia of British film and television featuring hundreds of hours of film and television clips from the vast collections of the BFI National Archive, and several hours of recorded interviews with film and TV personalities. These clips are supplemented by rich and authoritative contextual material by expert writers, specially commissioned for BFI Screenonline alongside thousands of stills, posters and press books. Categories of films include, culture and society, Britain and the world, war and conflict.


• Box of Broadcasts (BoB) : BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service. BoB is available to staff and students of member institutions of the British Universities Film & Video Council that hold an ERA+ license. This TV scheduling service allows you to record TV and radio programmes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of recorded channels (Select Sign In and search for the name of your university).


• British Library Sound Archive : Explore 45,200 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments. Please follow Log in via your home organisation link.


• Britishpathe : British Pathe online newsreel film library. The archive covers news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896-1970. Low resolution copies can be downloaded free.


• Phonogrammarchiv : The Phonogrammarchiv, an institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is the oldest sound archive in the world.

• Artcyclopedia : A huge online database of information about art and artists.


• Art History Resources : Bringing together links to many useful sources of art history information online.