Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM)

Script

All of the resources shown in this video are available to Western students, staff and faculty and can be accessed through the Western Libraries website or library catalogue. Licensed, online resources can be accessed from off-campus. You will need to log in with your Western ID and password.

RILM, or Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, is a bibliographic database. It includes references to scholarly musical literature, including journal articles dissertations, scholarly book chapters, and some newspapers. It's truly international, including references from around the world and in other languages. While Music Index is easier to use, RILM covers a greater scope of scholarly literature. See our "Music Index" video for more details. Music Index video https://youtu.be/Lht5v9hT-ko

To get to RILM, start at the Music Library's homepage, www.lib.uwo.ca/music. Scroll down to the section called "Key Research Resources” and find RILM.

We're going to search for references about "Charlie Christian" AND "guitar" AND "bebop." Once we've found some search results, we'll look for date of publication, volume, issue, page numbers, and potentially abstracts for each item.

If we find anything of interest, we can click on the "Get it @ Western" button. See our "Getting Full Text" video for more details. https://youtu.be/8XamSjAaH-E

Searching RILM is fairly straightforward. If you're after a source by a particular author, or know some of the words in the source's title, or have any other information about a source, you can select the field from this drop down and enter the information to the left. Let's see what we find.

Five search results: Three of these are in books, one is in an academic journal, and one appears to be a dissertation. This icon says periodical, but in this case it's not from an academic journal. This item is in a book, as is this one and this one. And the final hit is someone's dissertation or thesis.

So this periodical is "JazzTimes" and the article in question is from volume 30, issue number 6, and starts on page 48. Publication date is July/August 2000.

This item is in a book and it appears to be an article in "The Oxford Companion to Jazz." Page number is given here.

Here is another entry in a book. This one comes from "The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar." It's located on page 67.

This item is an entire book about the guitarist Tal Farlow. It likely has a section that mentions the guitarist Charlie Christian.

Similarly, our final hit is someone's dissertation, focused on Wes Montgomery, not on Charlie Christian. You can see the author of the dissertation here, and the date of publication here. To get more details on the item and how it relates to Charlie Christian, click on its title. And for this dissertation we have a very lengthy abstract, and you can see our search terms in bold, and we can see mention of Charlie Christian here.

If you'd like to get your hands on any of these items, click the "Get it @ Western" button. For this magazine article, it appears that we have this magazine in the Music Library, and some older issues perhaps in the Archives.

For these entries in books, click the "Get it @ Western" button. And it appears that we have this item in print.

Dissertations can be a little bit trickier to get. Let's see what happens when we click "Get it @ Western." While this is showing up in Western Libraries' catalogue, it appears that we do not have a copy of it. Let's login to my library account and see what happens. It's telling me that there are no available services for this item, but that doesn't mean that we can't get it. We may have online access to it through one of our dissertations and theses Databases https://www.lib.uwo.ca/tutorials/findingdissertations/, or we could order it through InterLibrary Loans. https://ocul-uwo.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/blankIll?vid=01OCUL_UWO:UWO_DEFAULT See our "Getting Full Text" video for more details. https://youtu.be/8XamSjAaH-E

If you are looking for literature from before World War II (or prior to mid-20th Century), ask us for help!

Most citation styles aren't very clear on how to cite music sources. See Indiana University Bloomington's "A Guide for Music Citation - Chicago/Turabian Style" for advice. https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=516265&p=3529690

These tips can help you, but finding music can be extremely tricky. If you've spent 10 minutes searching and still haven't found what you're after, ask us for help! We can be reached by email musref at uwo.ca, by phone 519-661-3913 or in person in the Music Library. You can contact me, Dan Sich, the Teaching and Learning Librarian covering Music, at dsich2 at uwo.ca or Brian McMillan, Head of the Music Library, at bmcmill2 at uwo.ca.

Western Libraries Music Library: https://www.lib.uwo.ca/music