Music: Books & eBooks

Information about books, scores, CDs, journals, databases and other useful music resources.

Finding Books using OneSearch

Watch a short tutorial on how to find print books and ebooks using OneSearch:

Short Loan & 4-Hour Collections

Short Loan Collection

The Short Loan Collection (SLC) contains multiple copies of books in demand, or on reading lists and can be borrowed for 7 days.

4-Hour Collection

The 4-Hour Loan collection contains items that are in very high demand at certain times of the year. You can borrow and take these books anywhere in the Library, but they cannot be taken out of the Library building.

Search Across Our Collections

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Books for Music

Books and eBooks are listed in OneSearch, our resource discovery service. Useful titles available via UCD Library include:

Academic Complete (Proquest Ebook Central) This link opens in a new window
An extensive multidisciplinary collection of online titles covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities.
ACLS Humanities E-Books This link opens in a new window
This comprehensive electronic library consists of scholarly and peer reviewed books in the humanities.
British Theatre, Music and Literature: Hight and Popular Culture (NCCO) This link opens in a new window
Primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history.

Reference Books for Online

Reference items are helpful for finding background information; definitions and spelling; facts and figures; translations; statistics and topical overviews of subjects. Reference books can be found both in print and online. See here for further information.

Useful online reference material for music include:

Oxford Music Online (OUP) This link opens in a new window
Oxford Music Online offers a dynamic research tool combining the full text of the 29-volume print edition with the added benefit of sophisticated search capabilities, one-click cross-referencing, and an ever increasing network of web-links to musical sites around the world.
Oxford Bibliographies Online (OUP) This link opens in a new window
Oxford Bibliographies provides faculty and students alike with a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in our database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP) This link opens in a new window
Authoritative biographical resource offering access to over 50,000 biographies of distinguished persons from all walks of life who have shaped the lives of the British Isles and beyond. Coverage: from earliest time to 2002. Includes deceased persons only. Powerful advanced search capabilities. Print version available in James Joyce Library at GR920.042/DIC.
Oxford Reference Online (OUP) This link opens in a new window
Oxford Reference Online consists of a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations found in dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press.

Where in the Library?

Most music books and scores material is held on level 2 of the James Joyce Library

Music Scores are marked in the catalogue as either Music Scores Large (ML) or Music Scores Miniature (MM).

CDs are held behind the Service Desk on Level 1 of the James Joyce Library.