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The primary ways to open a recording or score in Variations are:
- Library Catalog or Reserve List
- Experimental Search - Conduct detailed searches on a fraction of the available material
Variations has its own built-in search window that has been specially designed to support searching for music. So far, only a small portion of Variations materials have had the additional information added such that they can be searched using the Variations search window. The rest of this page describes how to search this subset of the online collection using the built-in search window. If you don't find find the materials you're looking for, please refer to your library catalog.
To search for a recording or score with the experimental search tool, first choose one of the following search tabs:
- Basic - Use this tab if commonly known information about your selection, such as composer, conductor or performer, is all you need.
- Advanced - Use this tab if you want to search for a selection based on more specific information, such as publisher or Library of Congress subject heading. A work title is the full name of the piece, for example "Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op.67". A Recording title may be the title of a CD or record on which the selection exists. If the two titles appear to be the same, enter it into the Work Title field first. If searching returns nothing for this, then enter the title into the Recording/Score title field and try your search again.
- Keyword - Use this tab if you want to search based on a word or words found anywhere in an item's record.
After selecting a tab, perform the search by following the steps below:
- Enter search term(s) into one or more fields.
- If desired, select any dropdown box options (e.g. Key).
- Press the Search button (or hit Enter on the keyboard).
- If you do not get any results try broadening your search. See the unsuccessful search tips at the bottom of this page for help.
Once you have retrieved results, choose from among the following steps:
- Select the correct creator if necessary. For example, a search for "Schu" would initially return Schubart, Schubert, Schulze, Schumann & Schütz as possible matches.
- On the composer selection screen, click the "Information" button
to see more information about the composer, including dates, variant names, links to online resources, etc. - To view all items for a composer click the "Select All" link.
- To find more works by the same composer click on the composer name link.
- To see the recordings and/or scores available for a work, click the "Work Title" link.
- On the works list screen, click the "Information" button to see more
detailed information about the work, including structure, instrumentation, date of composition, first performance, variant titles, etc.
At any time while the system is searching for results, the text "Searching.." will be displayed and you have the option to stop the search by pressing the "Cancel" button:
Search terms may be entered into Creator, Work Title, and Performer fields. Some possible ways to format terms for these fields include:
- Creator: bach, "Johann Sebastian", moz, faure
- Work Title: sonat, sym 94, "symphonies, H.I, 94", hymn
- Performer: bernstein, nbc orch, beatle
Note: Keyword search (only) does support Boolean operators, as the example "beatles NOT (help or anthology)" indicates.
The success of a search will depend on the format of your search terms and the way Variations handles particular input formats. Some of the more common concepts associated with searching that are supported by Variations include:
- Partial Matching - You do not need to enter the entire search term. For example, if you enter the term "Man" into the composer field, Variations will return results such as Mancini, Mannheim, etc.
- Single Field Matching - Each field can match only one thing at a time. For example, searching for "Lennon McCartney", "Lennon & McCartney" or "Lennon and McCartney" (with or without quotes) will return no results. The system will search for Lennon individually or McCartney individually but is unable to combine them to together to find works for which there are co-authors.
- Special Characters - Special characters include those with accent marks, diacritical marks, cedillas, etc. (e.g. á, ö, ñ, ç). If your search term contains such a character (e.g., the last letter of Fauré), simply enter the ordinary form of the character. Variations will search for and return matches regardless of whether or not there is supposed to be a special character in the term.
- Quotation Marks - You should use quotation marks when you are searching for an exact phrase, such as "Moonlight Sonata". In this case, Variations searches only for a title that contains exactly what is between the quotation marks, not the words in a different order or with intervening words. Quoted phrases match only complete words, so for example, "Moonlight Son" in quotes will not find Moonlight Sonata. When using quotation marks for a name of a person, be sure to put it in the format of "Last name, First name".
- Media Format - You may search for various media formats by selecting options in the Media Format dropdown list. Choose "All" to get the largest number of results, or choose a specific format for a narrower result set. To search for a Record/LP media format select "Analog Disc" from the dropdown box. If you do not see the media format you are looking for in the dropdown box, you may want to ask the reference librarian whether your specific media option is available for listening in the Variations system. It is very possible that some media types are not yet available in a digitized format.
Search Results: Format, Sorting, Navigating
Format - Searching may return four types of items: recordings, scores,
combined recording/score or encoded scores. The format of a selection will be denoted with a button.
A 
denotes that a recording is available for listening; a
denotes that a score is available for viewing; a
denotes that the selection is available in the Opus Window, meaning that both audio and score can be
viewed at the same time; and a 
denotes that the score is encoded and can be opened in other programs:
Sorting - You may sort your search results according to name/title of work or composer. You may also choose to show All search results, or ONLY recordings or scores:
Navigating - You may move backward and forward among your search results screens in the same manner you change screens in a Web browser. You can also use the Find function (Ctrl-F) to skip to a specific part in the results.
Themes - Some works will have themes listed under them. Showing the themes can be toggled on and off by the checkbox on the search menu. The works result list shows only one important theme per work, but the details window for a work may show multiple themes.
If you perform a search and do not get any results, it is possible that your search was too narrow because too many search terms were entered. To fix this problem, try a broader search by deleting terms from your search query. In the example below, the results indicate that there are no matches for both 'Tchaikovsky' and 'Sonata'. In this case, deleting either term will result in a successful search as there holdings for each. If the information indicates that a term produced '0' matches, you may want to delete that term entirely or check the spelling.
Note: Since Variations is in the early stages of implementation, it is very possible that your selection has not yet been entered into the Variations system. In this case, try doing a more general search by selecting "All Recordings" or "All Scores" from the Media Format dropdown box. It is also possible that the music library does not have the selection you are searching for. Try using your libary resources to make sure that your selection is available in the library. If this returns nothing, you might want to ask a reference librarian about possible options available to you for obtaining your selection.
If you perform a search and get too many results, only 100 will be displayed and a note will appear at the top of the search screen.
