New Zealand Music at the Library
Celebrate New Zealand music all year round - we have stacks of CDs at all of our libraries (plus some cassette tapes and even vinyl records) that you can borrow to listen to plus we have books about the New Zealand music scene if you're wanting to learn more about it. Here's a few tips to help you find what you're looking for.
Searching for CDs in our catalogue
The easiest way to search for New Zealand music is to do a subject search for the term "New Zealand Music", however this search will retrieve several thousand items including books and DVDs etc.
Musical styles
A more specific search will give you better results, for example include the musical style that you are after, e.g.
- Country music New Zealand
- Hiphop music New Zealand
- Orchestral music New Zealand
- Rock music New Zealand
Bands and artists
If you're after music by a specific band or artist you can simply do an author search on their name, e.g. Fourmyula. This will return any albums by that artist, however it won't find compilation albums that they're featured on. Luckily we have included a list of all song titles and artists featured on albums so an ordinary keyword search on their name e.g. Fourmyula will return albums that they're featured on (this works best for artists with quite unique names).
Song titles
So far so good. But what if youre actually looking for a specific song? As mentioned above, we've included a list of all the song titles in the record for every album that we have so a simple keyword search will work e.g. I love my leather jacket. Because a keyword search searches every part of every item record this might not work so well for one-word or very common song titles for example Nature so you may need to add more terms such as the musical style (subject) and artist (author).
Resources about New Zealand music
Most works about music are either histories or biographies or both so the following two subject searches will turn up most of them:
Current sources
We have extensive links in our Internet Gateway directory to New Zealand music web sites if you're after information about the current music scene. You should also try our news and magazines databases for online access to the full-text of articles from thousands of news sources such as magazines and industry journals, for example:
- Australia / New Zealand Reference Centre
Access this with your library card number and PIN, or at our libraries.
Sheet music
We have an extensive collection of scores and sheet music including books of music to play - for our New Zealand selection try the following subject search:
