 Music
Glossaries
In principle, the net makes a wonderful medium for glossaries and dictionaries
- they can be interactive and can use multimedia techniques. The diversity
of the on-line world gives us many highly specialised collections, produced
by both experts and novices. New terms can be added when appropriate, and
those using the facility can feed information back to the compilers very
easily, so that corrections can be made as soon as discovered, and everyone
can work with the latest definitions. (In some cases, users can add new
terms themselves.) Available technology can give users a searchable window
on various huge databases, and soundex type algorithms can be used
to match terms when the spelling is incorrect.
In practice, most glossaries are simple static pages, and are quite small,
but useful to browse if you know that the term you seek is, for example,
an early music term or a computer music term. The bigger search engines
(e.g. Altavista) should show you
the definitions, anyhow, in any glossary in which they're mentioned, and
for seldom-used entries, you probably won't need to search through many
pages before reading a relevant glossary entry. Try also OneLook Dictionaries
(see below). The main problem is that the information available is currently
very patchy, as can be seen from the selection of glossaries listed below.
Copyright © Keith Bramich, March
23rd 1999.
Lists of glossaries
- OneLook Dictionaries - a system
which indexes other dictionaries, so that look ups can be made from one
place. Also has links to other dictionaries.
- Online Dictionaries,
Glossaries and Encyclopaedias is a big list of links to glossaries
of all types. It seems to have been abandoned for about three years, and
so some of the links are now out of date.
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