Alexander Street Open Music Library Project Ending May 26th

Over the past few years, Alexander Street, a ProQuest company, has led a project to build a community website—Open Music Library—combining subscription and open materials in a free index of digital resources supporting the study of music.

On May 26, 2020, we are concluding the Open Music Library project. ProQuest is continuing to develop other open initiatives to serve the community and engage users across many disciplines. This includes efforts that will better connect users to important open and publicly available content, as well as offering users improved access to their institution’s ProQuest and Alexander Street resources. This is an ongoing focus area and we will communicate key aspects of this work on a regular basis.

The Open Music Library (openmusiclibrary.org) will go permanently offline on May 26, 2020. We suggest users of the Open Music Library visit and bookmark https://search.alexanderstreet.com/musc to access their Alexander Street subscription music resources across audio, scores, reference, video and more.

For those libraries linking to openmusiclibrary.org on LibGuides or A-Z lists, we encourage you to update those respective URLs to instead link to your institution’s music resources found on https://search.alexanderstreet.com and https://search.proquest.com/.

As an early initiative to aggregate and connect open resources into a community, the Open Music Library project has provided valuable feedback from diverse users and librarians around the world. The lessons learned from this project are laying the foundation for future open and community initiatives at ProQuest.



Note Regarding the International Journal for the Study of Music and Musical Performance

The International Journal for the Study of Music and Musical Performance, an open access journal formerly hosted on the Open Music Library, is now accessible on the ProQuest Platform: bookmark this link to access the journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Open Music Library (OML)?

The Open Music Library has been a project to build a free index of digital resources for the study of music. Curated by a community of music scholars, students, teachers and librarians, the Open Music Library has brought together peer-reviewed journal articles, books and music scores from the world’s digital collections.

The OML has contained scores, audio, video, and periodicals from the Alexander Street and ProQuest portfolios, as well as open materials from around the web. Any user can see previews of Alexander Street and ProQuest database content, and authorized users can see the full view.

What content has been included in the OML for Alexander Street and ProQuest music subscribers?

Alexander Street subscription content has included:

Music Online: Classical Music Library (audio)

Music Online: Classical Scores Library (text/image)

Music Online: Classical Performance in Video (video)

ProQuest subscription content has included:

ProQuest Music Periodicals Database

Why is ProQuest shutting down the Open Music Library?

The OML has always been a project, not a product. As a company we are focusing on other open and community initiatives that will help us benefit more users across many disciplines to more broadly meet user needs in research, teaching and learning.

Additionally, Alexander Street and ProQuest are continuing to invest in the music discipline. Compared to the OML site, the Alexander Street platform (search.alexanderstreet.com) offers more performing arts subscription content including streaming audio across genres (jazz/world/popular music), dance and theatre.

When is the OML site going to go offline?

The OML is ceasing as of May 26, 2020 and at that time institutions can access their music databases at http://search.alexanderstreet.com/musc and at various databases on the ProQuest platform http://search.proquest.com.

I created playlists on the OML and also uploaded documents. Can I get access to those items to save them?

The Open Music Library remains fully functional until May 26, 2020. Prior to that date, please save a local copy of any documents you uploaded to Open Music Library and bookmark any links. We will be unable to retrieve user-generated playlists after May 26, 2020.

We recommend creating playlists on the Alexander Street platform at search.alexanderstreet.com. All audio, video, and score subscription content is available on this platform, and users can also include links to open materials on external sites (e.g. YouTube, national library collections, Wikipedia). You can control the privacy settings of playlists to make them available privately, to your institution, or publicly.

You can find a tutorial on creating playlists on the Alexander Street platform here: https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C3819806

I am a registered user of the Open Music Library. What happens to my data?

Please see ProQuest's Privacy Policy located here: https://www.proquest.com/about/privacy-statement.html.

Contact support@proquest.com for help with creating playlists on search.alexanderstreet.com.

For other questions, please contact Product Manager Danielle Sargent.