Music Resources in GopherSpace





M I C H I G A N - S C H O O L - B A N D - & - O R C H E S T R A - A S S O C I A T I O N

Barton Polot
is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Music Technology at the University of Michigan

BARTON POLOT

n October's issue of MICHIGAN MUSICTECH I recommended Michigan's Merit System as your mode of transportation on the Information Highway. Although faster and more versatile vehicles exist (perhaps the subject of a future article), the Merit System provides Internet access to anyone with a computer and a modem. In this article we will travel around the Gopher Space to find locations of interest to musicians.

Our first stop is the San Antonio campus of the University of Texas. To get there, select Other Gopher Servers, then North America, USA, Texas, and finally The University of Texas San Antonio — UTSAInfo.

The Music School at UTSA maintains an Institute for Music Research, and it provides several tools of interest. Besides providing news on music research and upcoming conferences, it serves as the gateway to Technology In Music Education (TIME), a bibliographic database of music software reviews and archives. Here you will find an extensive list of music CAI software listed both alphabetically and by category, each with hardware requirements and sources for review. It is also the gateway for the Computer Assisted Information Retrieval Service System (CAIRSS), a bibliographic database of music research literature.

Like many Gopher servers, the UTSA site also provides links to other services of interest to musicians. Rather than retracing your steps, you can use UTSA's Gopher to transport you directly to another site — the University of California - Irvine, for example, which maintains The Music and the Brain Information Center. There you will find the Musica Database of scientific research (references & abstracts) on music as related to behavior, the brain and allied fields.

Or, check out the Research Studies in Music Education (RSME), an on-line collection of abstracts culled from this new Australian publication.

Another excellent source for musicians is the Office of Research in Arts Technology (ORAT) at Illinois State University. Music students at Illinois State are very active on the Internet; their site is rich in multimedia content — sound files, MIDI files, graphic images, movies. Unfortunately, GOPHERBLUE users cannot download these files directly. These treasures await your graduation to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the subject of a future Internet article.

The University of Utah maintains a Music Gopher, with information about the New York State Council of Music Teacher Education Programs (CONTEP), Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE), and the International Music Education Index.

The Utah site is one of several that allow you explore the holdings of many of the world's major libraries. Although you cannot "check out a book" on-line (at least not yet), you can conduct unlimited searches of digital card catalogs.

Part of the joy of the Internet is following links from one remote site to another. It's like browsing the world's largest and most eclectic reference book. See you on the Net.

Update: Since this article appeared in February 1995, many of the Gopher sites listed above have migrated to the World Wide Web; these sites have been linked accordingly. Other sites are no longer available.