MUSIC & ART PATHFINDER

Composers

Finding Art Images

Photojournalism
 

COMPOSERS
This guide is designed for people of all ages who are looking for information on composers of classical music. Included are print-based and Web-based resources. Its sources are geared toward general knowledge as well as scholarly research.

Print Sources
There are many good collections of brief biographies about composers that are written for the layman. The following examples are likely to be found in your public library:

Lives of the Great Composers, by Harold C. Schonberg. W.W. Norton, 1981.

Great Composers : 1300-1900, by David Ewen. H.W. Wilson, 1966.

Composers Since 1900, by David Ewen. H.W. Wilson, 1981.

Each of these books is a single volume work which contains chapters on the lives and music of the best known composers of western classical music. Be aware that works lists and bibliographies in these sources will not be the most current scholarly information available. For facts about contemporary or lesser known composers, try the following two sources:

Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, edited by Nicholas Slonimsky. Schirmer Books, 1991.

International Who's Who in Music and Musician's Directory. Melrose Press, 1988.

For those beginning serious research on a particular composer, the following sources are the best places to begin your searching:

Index to Composer Bibliographies, by Richard D. Green. Information Co-ordinators, 1985.

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. MacMillan, 1980.

Green's book is a thorough listing of bibliographies for individual composers, while the twenty volume Grove set contains articles, works lists, and bibliographies on hundreds of composers. Grove's is considered the scholarly source on classical music in English.

If you are looking for magazine and journal articles about a composer, perhaps you will find the information you need in The Music Index, published by Information Co-ordinators. Available in CD-ROM and print forms, this publication lists articles written on myriad musical subjects and covers music journals on an international scale. You are likely to find the index in a specialized music library.

If browsing is what you prefer, check out the 780's in your public library. In the 780.92's, you will find individual biographies about musicians. In most universities, the ML 410's are the corresponding classification area for musician biographies.

Internet Sources
The World Wide Web is an information resource with literally hundreds of pages devoted to classical music composers. These sites vary in their scholarship and accuracy, so judgment on the part of the user is critical. The following sites are good starting points for general knowledge about composers:

The Internet Public Library's Music History 102 http://www.ipl.org/div/mushist/  is an excellent collection of pages geared toward the layperson or young adult. Composers are discussed within the context of their time, while short audio clips further enhance the exhibit.

Another good place to search for general information on composers is Yahoo's Classical Music Index, http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Genres/Classical. Though it can be a bit overwhelming, this index does a good job of placing classical music sites in understandable categories. Of course, searching on any composer's name with a decent search engine is bound to yield some results.

For those interested in composer sites that have presumably been reviewed by musicians before inclusion in an index, these three sites come to the fore:

The Classical Net Homepage http://www.classical.net/ is a great place to find biographical facts, as well as works lists for composers. This site also has links to classical music UseNet Newsgroups which may prove valuable.

Similarly, you may want to find a good listserv if you have questions you want to pose to the musical community at large. Try Music Listservs - http://www.csupomona.edu/~library/tutorials/Music/internet.html#Music%20Listservs/ - from "Finding Music Information on the Internet", compiled by the University Library at Cal Poly Pomona University for a start.

The Sibelius Academy Composer Index http://www.siba.fi/Kulttuuripalvelut/composing.html and Indiana University's Worldwide Internet Music Resources Composer Index http://www.music.indiana.edu/music_resources/composer.html are both fantastic sources for high quality information on classical music on the Internet. Indiana's site also has a listing of classical music UseNet Groups, as well as listings for magazines and journals with homepages. If you should visit the Sibelius Academy and Indiana University sites, make sure to check out their home pages, which have numerous other categories besides composers. You will find yourself turning to these homepages whenever you need information about anything musical!

This pathfinder created by David Chalick, December 3, 2002. Revised March 2005.
You may also wish to see IPL: Musicians &Composers Resources
 

FINDING ART IMAGES

This pathfinder will help you find images of art works on and off the Web. This could include pictures of paintings, sculptures, etc.; some of the tricks for finding art images on the Web can also be used to find other Web images as well.

Find art images in the library
For many art works, especially famous ones, the greatest assortment of images in one place will likely be a book devoted to the subject. A book on Van Gogh will usually lots of pictures with the text, and may even have an index of illustrations so you can find the one that you want. You may be able to find such books at your local public or university library: try looking for the artist's last name as a Subject in the Online Catalog or Card Catalog.

If you can't find a book on the artist, pictures of the work you are looking for may be in an anthology containing the works of many artists. There are indexes that will tell which anthologies have pictures of which works. Such indexes can be found under many Subject Headings in library catalogs:

Pictures-Indexes
Painting-Indexes
Sculpture-Indexes

Sometimes you will find more regionally-specific indexes. To find these, try looking for the artist's country between a set of double dashes (—) before the term "Indexes":

Painting—United States-Indexes
Sculpture—Great Britain-Indexes

You can use these subject headings to guide your search, or ask the staff at your library for help finding these indexes.

Finding Images on the Web
There are lots of art images and image collection on the Web, but they can be hard to find and many of the collections are relatively small. Many of the image collections on the Web are made available by the museums that own the originals, so it can be helpful to know where the original work is. If you do know where the original is, try looking for the museum in: Yahoo's Yahoo's Art Museum and Gallery hierarchy (this page may not contain a link to the museum's home page directly, but it provides links to different lists of museums (sculpture museums, architecture museums, etc.) as well as a link to Web Directories for Museums and Galleries.

Some other valuable resources for finding Web images:

World Wide Art Resources http://wwar.com/ is an index of art resources on the web, searchable by artists' names, museum names, exhibition titles/subject, among other ways. This is a rather high-tech site with a few too many pop-up windows, but it is an excellent resource.

Searching for Web images:
Curiously enough, perhaps the fastest and most efficient way of finding images of any kind (not just art images) on the web can be to guess what someone else will name the image, and then use a search engine to look for that name. This works best with images of generic things (cats, cauldrons, trees, etc.) and with famous images (da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Starry Night, etc.)

The Search Engine best equipped to find images is AltaVista, which lets users search just for words associate with images, instead of words anywhere in the text of the document. For example, you could be looking for a picture of the Mona Lisa, and use a search engine to look for all the pages with the phrase "mona lisa" in them, but that won't find an image right away. Using AltaVista, search for:
image:"mona lisa" or image:"monalisa".

This will only bring back pages with the words "mona lisa" or "monalisa" associated with an image (that is, as the name of an image file).
Using AltaVista, you can also shorten, or "truncate" your search strings to catch variants of words. For example, if you are looking for pictures of Starry Night, you may find images called: starry, starryn, starry-night, starry_night, etc. To catch all of them, you can use the * symbol (shift-8 on most keyboards) like this:
image:starry*

That will find all images that have a name beginning with "starry"—including people who put of pictures of "A starry night in Texas" or any number of other things not related to Van Gogh's painting. In order to cut back on such occurences, try combining terms:
image:starry* and (vangogh or "van gogh")
This will look only for pages with image files called starry-something, and also mention Van Gogh.

A modified version of this tactic works with other full-text search engines like Excite and HotBot . While these engines don't have the ability to search for text strings in the image file name, you can work with the knowledge that most image files end with the string ".gif" or ".jpg": it is often productive to try to guess the name of the file. To find Starry Night, you could search for (starry.jpg or starry.gif) and ("van gogh" or vangogh)

If you can figure out what name someone is likely to call the file, try searching for it. Using the Boolean or Advanced Search feature on search engines (where available) you can add the artists name with the "and" command to increase the chances of finding the image you want. If the first name you try doesn't work, try adding to the name: starry1, starry01, starryn, etc.

If you want images in a particular size, it is good to know that .jpg images are likely to be larger than .gif images because .jpg images don't take up as much computer memory; they lose a little quality in the process, but not usually enough to notice with the naked eye. If you only want large images, try just looking for images files ending in ".jpg".

Using search engines find images is a very haphazard method, but there seems to be a critical mass of information on the Web, and a sufficient degree of predictability in how files are named that this method actually works well.

This pathfinder created by Ken Irwin.
 

PHOTOJOURNALISM
This guide is designed to help people who are looking for information about the practice of photojournalism. Its sources will lead the user to information about professional standards and practices, organizations and the best of the photographs past and present. It is intended to help people understand how the photojournalist works, and the issues that they face. It is not intended to help the user browse the day's news photography.

Print Sources
These sources are equally useful for the person who wants to know something about photography and for the photojournalism student/practitioner. They are likely to be found in your public library.

The Picture History of Photography, from the Earliest Beginnings to the Present Day,by Peter Pollack (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1969)  A thorough general history of photography which includes plenty of information about the history of photojournalism.

Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America,by Maryanne Fulton (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988)  This history of American photojournalism concentrates on the twentieth century.

One of the best ways to learn about photography is to study the work of one photographer at a time, just as you would a painter. These publishers have a long history of publishing outstanding books on photography: Aperture, Knopf, New York Graphic Service (NYGS) and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux or Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy.

For a survey of photojournalism from the thirties to the sixties try these books culled from the best of Life magazine. Although they reflect one editorial view, Life was one of the best of the picture magazines during that time.

The Best of Life (New York: Time-Life Books, 1973)

Life:the second decade 1946-1955 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984)

Life Goes to War: a picture history of World War II (Boston: Little, Brown 1977)

Great Photographic Essays from Life (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978)

The sources below are aimed more narrowly at the photographer or photography student. They are more likely to be found in a large library with an art department, or in a university library.

Photojournalism: The Professionals' Approach, by Ken Kobre (Boston: Focal Press, 1991)
This is a well accepted general textbook which spends at least as much time on professionalism as on technique.

Photojournalism, by Arthur Rothstein (Garden City, N.Y. :Amphoto, 1979)
This basic text on photojournalism is dated but still a very good on the creative process.

Picture Editing and Layout: A Guide to better Visual Communication, by Angus Macdougal &Veita Jo Hampton (Viscom: 1990)
This book concentrates on what makes a picture effective, from composition of the photograph to layout on the page.

Look for publications by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), particularly the annual Best of Photojournalism, and various white papers on professional issues in photojournalism. Your best bet is in the library of a university which offers a master's in photojournalism or has a strong journalism department (see the entry under online sources).

Finding Sources at the Library
The primary location for books in a library using the Library of Congress system is TR820 (photojournalism). This is where you will find most of the books on the subject. However, photojournalism is closely connected with other aspects of photography. If the work is of historical or technical interest it may be elsewhere in the TR's. If the TR collection is not large it could be worth browsing through it all, particularly TR23, TR140, TR647, and TR654. You may find the Life magazine sources under PN4900. Remember that some photojournalists are also considered fine art photographers.

In a library using the Dewey Decimal system the work on photojournalism tends to be more spread out. Most photography will be in the 770's, particularly 778-779, but a lot of it will be in the 910's (Travel), 970's (General History of North America), and other areas according to the subject of the photographs. I suggest searching the online catalog by photographer's name and by the subject of the photographs as well as looking in these.

When you are looking, don't forget that a lot of photography books are oversized. Ask your librarian whether these are shelved separately if you can't find them.

Online Sources
The World Wide Web is full of information on photojournalism, but of course a lot of it is commercial, by subscription only, marketing material, or amateur or student work. The sources below are on a professional level, but offer a lot of interest the person who is interested in photojournalism without wanting to practice it. Most of their resources are free.

National Press Photographers Association (http://www.nppa.org) The NPPA is the United States' preeminent organization for photojournalists. The emphasis is on daily newspaper photography. Their annual is the first, if not the only, place to look for the best in current photojournalism. The site also offers a comprehensive collection of links to online information sources, and a list of recommended books and white papers which is well worth checking out.

American Society of Media Photographers (http://www.asmp.org/) (ASMP). Most magazine photographers belong to this organization. The site is not as rich as the NPPA's, but still worth looking into.

The Digital Journalist (http://www.dirckhalstead.org/) is an E-zine featuring exhibitions of individual photographers' work. The gallery includes contemporary photographers and others of historical interest, and the quality is very high. There is also a large section of "war stories" which are interesting for their glimpse into the life of a photojournalist, as well as for the information they offer about working conditions and how photographers deal with them. Contributors discuss professional issues ranging from economics to ethics to technology.

Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) has a subject category for photojournalism immediately under Arts and Humanities (photography): http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photojournalism/

This pathfinder created by Barry Blitzsten.