Overview

Our jobs as library professionals sometimes involve answering the questions "Who said it and when?," "Who wrote it and when?" or possibly, "Could you help me find a poem or a quote that expresses my joy, sadness, love or any other feeling on some occasion like a retirement, a wedding, a funeral, etc.?"

By now you know that every good search begins with a good reference interview, but there are particular things that are helpful to find out or be aware of when looking for a poem, song, or quotation:

1. People who are looking for poems and quotes are looking for them because they don't remember them. Obviously, if they knew them they would not be asking. Therefore, expect errors and mistakes in the clues you have to work with.
   
   
2. If the library user just gives you a title, ask them if they remember any part of the poem. Words in the text can be a valuable clue. Usually, there is some part of the poem that they like that is the reason for wanting to retrieve it. Library users may think that providing a title (and sometimes an author) of a poem will be enough to find it. What if the title they remember isn't right?
   
   
3. If you can, find out when and where the user first heard the piece. If the patron is 75 years old and remembers it from his childhood, you can eliminate very modern sources. Context can give you good clues to finding answers.
   
   
4. In keyword searching, try plurals and singulars. For example, try dogs if you don't find dog. If man does not work, try men, men's or man's.
   
   
5. Try synonyms. If man does not work, try human, people, person, or someone. This is an especially good idea when looking for works in translation.
   
   
6. Get as many clues as you can, but remember: any one of them may be wrong! In these days of web searching, the chances are good that the patron has already tried looking for it herself. If one or more of the words she used was not exact, the search would not have returned a successful result. Often, people think that the author of a poem or quote was a familiar source, like Shakespeare or the Bible. (Twain and Einstein are favorites, too.) It might well be. It might also be someone else. Don't limit yourself.
   
   
7. Remember: in the clues you get there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
   
   
8. Make good use of key words when using indexes to poetry, song, and quote sources.
   
   
9. Poems, songs, and quotes are all interrelated. Very often songs are poems put to music. If the library user thinks it's a song and you don't find it, try it as a poem.
   
   
10. Quotation dictionaries index poems and songs, too. They are great for middle lines or familiar lines that are not first or last lines.

In searching for the correct poem, song or quote, a (sometimes) fast and effective search depends on doing your homework. In this case, your homework is an effective reference interview.

Poems

It's the poem they read at my high school graduation... My mother loved this poem... I only know the first line... Where can I get a copy of the words? Who is the author?

If and when a library user is trying to locate a poem with which you are not familiar, there are several resources for you to turn to.

Searching the Internet

If your library subscribes to a database that covers this kind of material, it should be your first stop. Find out if you have access to LitFinder (PoemFinder), Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, or another poetry database. If you don't, often the best strategy is to try a web search first. Use the search engine of your choice and search the title, key words or phrases, the author's name, or whatever you have. If you have a long phrase like one or more lines of the poem, try the whole thing in quotation marks. If that doesn't work, pick a smaller phrase within the line, or two or three words in the line you have, and try searching for those separately. Remember to try variants of singular, plural, and synonyms. Even if you don't come up with the full text, you can often get more information (such as an author) that can lead you to the next step.

Make sure to evaluate the source for the accuracy of any information you might find. If you are not sure of its reliability, the ideal thing to do is take the time to find independent verification from a source you can trust.

Searching Print Resources

If you have it in your library, Granger's Index to Poetry, which has been published by Columbia University Press since 1904, is probably the best volume to consult. This book (in its many editions) is an index by author, title, first line, and subject (in later editions) to poems in several hundred anthologies. Anthologies are collections of works by different authors. Granger's may also be used to locate English translations of poems written in many foreign languages. Although the different editions index many of the same anthologies, each covers some not indexed by the others.

Please take note of an important fact. Until the 11th edition (1996), Granger's did not index any book devoted entirely to a single poet. However, in 1996 this approach changed, and Granger's was published in two volumes: Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies (more than one author) and Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works (single authors). The current Anthologies volume is 2002, and the Poetry and Selected Works is 2004.

A good example of an anthology is the Oxford Book of Scottish Verse. Granger's has indexed this sort of collection since its beginning. Since 1996, with the publication of Granger's Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works, collections such as Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, which is exclusively the poetry of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), have also been indexed. Obviously, both books include the poems of Burns, but the latter contains only Burns.

While you may not have the volume of Granger's that indexes works by single poets, your library probably does have some edition of the Index to Poetry in Anthologies. In any case, many poems not listed in either book can be found easily if you know the author and have a compilation of that author's works. Granger's also includes a list arranged by author and then by title of all poems included in the anthologies indexed. This section may come in handy if you know the author of a poem but cannot quite remember the title.

The older editions can be great for finding elusive materials like monologues and speeches of historical interest. In order to stay current and not get too large, each new edition of Granger's includes most, but not all, of the anthologies in the older editions. Therefore, if you have older editions of Granger's, you might want to keep them around.

Many times a library user will remember, more or less correctly, material from a poem other than the first lines. Granger's "Title and First Line Index" contains some lines other than the first, but it cannot be depended upon to do so. A quotation dictionary like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations or Stevenson's Book of Home Quotations is much better for identifying poems from lines other than the first. Since you often won't know whether a line is the first line, or even whether it's from a poem, you should check Bartlett's if you can't find anything in Granger's.

Beginning with the 4th edition in 1953, Granger's has offered a subject arrangement of the poems indexed. The number of subject headings has been expanded in later editions. There are no cross-references from one subject heading to another, so it will be especially important to think of synonyms and other related words for the subject you want. Some of the headings, like "life" and "friendship," are broad, while others like "Moderation" or "Melville, Herman" (as a subject, not an author) are quite specific.

Starting with the 10th edition of Granger's, published in 1994, a "Last Line Index" has been added to the section containing the title and first line indexes. The 12th edition was published in 2002, indexing anthologies published through December 31, 2001. It provides indexing of the last lines for 10,000 of the "most frequently cited" poems. Note that this is not all 81,000 of the total number of poems in Granger's. The last lines of poems are marked with an "LL" as in "'Never to part more'. (LL) from 'Meeting' " by Christina Rosetti. Every poem is indexed at least once in each category (title, author, first line, last line, subject), except in cases where the editors considered the subject too abstract to classify in one of the subject headings.

Remember that Granger's is just an index and does not contain the poem itself. All it can do is help you find poems in other books. Granger's Index to Poetry is most useful, therefore, to libraries that own many of the anthologies that are indexed. Even if you don't have any of the anthologies, it is still worth having because it will help you answer questions like "Who wrote the poem that starts 'In pious times ere priest-craft did begin'?" Or "Who wrote 'The Barefoot Boy'?" Plus, you may be able to locate the poem you need in an anthology another library owns. If so, they may be able to help you by faxing or mailing you a copy. Many libraries have staff look up all of the anthologies in the library catalog and mark them in the book with call numbers so that you can tell at a glance if your library owns an anthology. Beginning with the 7th edition, published in 1982, the Granger's editorial staff has marked the list of anthologies with a double asterisk ** for 10 titles that they highly recommend for purchase by even small libraries, and marked with a single asterisk * 30 titles they recommend for further purchase.

Other Print Sources

Remember, Granger's is not the only place to look for poems. We already mentioned that quotation dictionaries can be of great help, and we've named two: Bartlett's and Stevenson's. Here are some other useful sources.

Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature in print format is a good source for classic and older poems. From 1919 to 1957, Reader's Guide indexed poems under "Poems" (surprise!). Looking in the March 1955 to February 1957 Edition we find 22 pages of poetry by title under the "Poems" heading. There is also the notation, "See name of author for full entry." Reader's Guide also lists poems under their subjects, where appropriate. So, if your library owns any of these older editions of Reader's Guide, they can be very useful.

In addition to Granger's and Reader's Guide, there are other general indexes to poetry. Some of these are Last Lines: An Index to the Last Lines of Poetry (1991) by Victoria Kline, and Master Index to Poetry: An Index to Poetry in Anthologies & Collections (2nd edition, 1992). Last Lines, containing as it does the "punch lines" of thousands of poems, is especially appropriate for aspiring poets among your clientele.

Some indexes specialize in certain areas such as Twentieth Century Poetry from Spanish America: An Index to Spanish Language and Bilingual Anthologies (1998) and Index to Poetry for Children and Young People, edited by G. Meredith Blackburn. This latter reference work, last published by H.W. Wilson in 1999, is especially appropriate for the children's department. The main rule here, as noted above, is: If you have these reference books in your library, familiarize yourself with them and use them! Both you and the library user will benefit. And if your library doesn't have these works or if the ones you do have are extremely out-of-date, you might recommend that they be purchased.

To recap:

1. Granger's is an index only; poems themselves are not included. It includes title, author, first line, and subject indexes, and, as of the 10th edition in 1994, last line indexes.
   
   
2. Use web searches and quotation dictionaries, especially if all you have is part of a poem.
   
   
3. If you have poetry index books in your library, familiarize yourself with them and use them.
   
   

Songs

Library users will often come to the library looking for the sheet music for a song. They will be able to provide some information about the song, such as the title, a few lines, or who performed it. If the song can be found in the library's collection, it will probably be in a book collection of sheet music, although some libraries have collections of individual sheet music. The Internet can be a valuable resource for gathering information that may lead you to a sheet music source, but it is extremely rare to find actual sheet music, even if it is in the public domain.

Searching for Songs

The first step is to identify the pieces of information that the library user already knows. Here is some important data to look for:

• Title: All song indexes index by title, so this is an essential piece of information. Sometime the library user may not remember the title correctly, or the song may be known by more than one title. Indexes will usually index by alternate titles.
  
  
• Performer: The performer is often different than the writer of the song. While knowing the performer can be useful in identifying the song, it will not help when using a song index.
  
  
• Writer: Since different songs may have the same title, the writer is used to uniquely identify a song.
  
  
• First Line, Chorus, or Other Line: Many song indexes will index by first line. Some may allow you to search by another portion of the lyrics, say the last line or chorus.

If a song is currently or very recently popular, it's probable that few, if any, libraries have purchased any books containing it. If it has been published in print at all, the library user will probably have to purchase it. There are online sheet music and songbook retailers.

Resources in Print

Fake Books

Fake books are large collections of popular songs. Fake books typically only contain the lyrics, chord changes, and melody lines of each song. A fake book includes all the notes and chords a person needs to know to play favorite songs.

You can find out if your library has any fake books by performing a keyword search using the term "fake book."

Song Indexes

Song indexes will typically index a song by title and first line. Alternate titles are often indexed as well. Different songs with the same title are distinguished by including the writer's name (in parentheses, for example).

The song index will not provide the words or music of a song; it will tell you what book contains the song. The next step is to obtain a copy of that book. Check your catalog first. If not in your collection, then you will have to borrow it from another library. Your interlibrary loan department should be able to locate a copy and request the book for you.

Song indexes are usually located in the 016.78xxx or 784.xxx Dewey ranges. Search for these using the subject headings: songs - indexes. You can also search "songs index" as a keyword search.

Here are some commonly held song indexes. Check to see which ones your library owns:

• Great Song Thesaurus. 2nd ed. Roger Lax and Frederick Smith. Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Popular Song Index. Patricia Pate Havlice. Scarecrow Press, 1975.
  First Supplement, 1978.
  Second Supplement, 1984.
  Third Supplement, 1989.
  
  
• Song Finder: A Title Index to 32,000 Popular Songs in Collections, 1854-1992. Comp. by Gary Lynn Ferguson. Greenwood Press, 1995.
  
  
• Song Index and Supplement, 1934. Edited by Minnie Earl Sears. Originally published in 1926 and 1934; reprinted by Shoe String Press, 1966.

Like the poetry index Granger's, these are only indexes, and you would still have to find the song book in which the item your user wants is located, either in your library, through interlibrary loan, or from your local library system's reference center.

California Library Systems' Reference Centers

If you determine that your library does not have the sheet music for a song, your next step is to contact the CLSA library system's reference center that serves your area. If you do not know how to refer a question to them, ask your supervisor. The reference centers get frequent requests for sheet music, as this is one area in which the Internet is unable to provide what the patron needs. Some of the reference centers have extensive collections of sheet music, and your local one might even have the music your patron wants and can fax it to you the same day. Even if they don't, they can call on the collections of the other reference centers in the state. And if the other reference centers don't have it either, they still might be able to come up with it another way. This is true for all reference questions, but it is especially so in the case of sheet music.

There is an online index to the collections of many of the reference centers at the California Library Systems Cooperative Song Index (www.sjvls.org/songs). It contains over 145,000 song titles (mostly popular music) from 1,500 sheet music collections (in song books, magazines, and other collections). It also indexes the collections of some of the systems' member libraries. Your library users have access to the sheet music indexed here through referral by their local library.

The Internet

If you don't have the title and composer of a song, you might turn up additional information by taking whatever pieces of information you do have and using them as key words and/or phrases in a search engine. If the library user knows only some lyrics, then searching a phrase from those lyrics may turn up the entire lyrics with the title of the song, the writer, performer, etc. You will usually get better results if you include the word "lyrics" in your search. Occasionally the sheet music for a song will be available on the web, but this is very rare.

There are websites that do provide free lyrics. The site www.elyrics.net is one of them. At that site, as of January 2004, there are lyrics to over 100,000 songs from over 6,000 artists. Their focus is mostly modern popular music. As an example, let's say that a library user comes to you and says "I need the lyrics to a song, and one of the lines is "Please allow me to introduce myself." This phrase is common, so you use Google to search for it. You put the phrase in quotes, and add the word "lyrics." You get about 4,000 hits, but one of the first results tells you that the line comes from "Sympathy for the Devil" by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. You can click on one of the results from the Google search to get the full set of lyrics, or you can search for them at elyrics.net, where you learn that three other groups, including "Guns 'N Roses" and "Poison," have recorded this song.

You get the lyrics but not the sheet music. Also, in the case of "Sympathy for the Devil," Stones version, you get lines like "Yow! Yow! Yow!" and "Umph, ca, umph, umph." You will also note that pop-up ads on sites for lyrics are plentiful. You can print out the lyrics in a "printer friendly version" from elyrics.net. But you still don't have the sheet music, and you will have to keep looking, if that is what the library user needs. Here's the bottom line: the Internet is a good tool, but a lot of websites are highly commercial. And it is easy to get incomplete or even incorrect information. Always remember to evaluate what you find.

Here are some sites for finding lyrics and other information (some with sound files) that you might want to have a look at:

• America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets (lyrics, no music) (memory.loc.gov/ammem/amsshtml)
• Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and America (contemplator.com/folk.html)
• Cyber Hymnal (cyberhymnal.org)
• negrospirituals.com
• Mudcat Cafe (digital tradition: folk, blues) (mudcat.org)

Online Song Indexes

Online song indexes, catalogs, and other bibliographic databases are the other important resource for locating a song. Many bibliographic records for song books include the titles of the songs contained in the book in the notes field of the record. In library catalogs, this field is often searched automatically when doing a title search. Sometimes the notes field is searched separately, with a "contents notes" or similarly named search. Unfortunately, there are just as many, if not more, bibliographic records that do not include the contents in the notes field. There may be a book in your collection that has the song, but you wouldn't know it by searching the catalog. There are some good song indexes on the web, in addition to the California Library Systems Cooperative Song Index, mentioned above. Here are a few:

• San Jose King Library Music Collections (sjlibrary.org/research/special/music_coll)
  San Jose's main Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library houses a number of collections of sheet music and music in songbooks. From this site, you can search the indexes to:
  • The Sheet Music Collection, a gift collection of over 18,000 pieces of sheet music for popular songs from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s
  • The Songs/Songbooks Collection, a continuing collection that contains a wide variety of music with an emphasis on popular music from the 1970s on. It presently includes over 500 songbooks with over 22,000 titles.
  • The Magazine Music Collection, bound volumes of Sheet Music Magazine and Sing Out! Magazine
  • The 17,000 titles in the Choral Music Collection
  • The Stock Music Collection, another donation that consists mostly of big band music from 1878 to 1967 with parts for different band instruments.
    
    
• Santa Cruz Public Libraries Sheet Music Database (santacruzpl.org/sheetmusic)
  The Santa Cruz Public Libraries' sheet music collection contains more than 12,000 individual pieces of popular and folk/traditional music, issues of Sheet Music Magazine from 1977 up to the present, and songbooks in the Central Branch reference department. Most of the music in the collection is for piano and guitar.
  
  
• Patchogue-Medford (NY) Library Popular Song Index (www.pmlib.org/songindex.php)
  This is an index to selected books of popular songs in the collection of the Patchogue-Medford Library. There are more than 100,000 entries from over 1,000 books.

Historical Sources of Song Information

If the music the user is looking for is so old that it is not copyrighted any more (over 70 years with no renewal of copyright), you might find it in the growing number of historical sheet music databases. Here are a few:

• University of Colorado Digital Sheet Music Collection (ucblibraries.colorado.edu/music/smp/)
  The University of Colorado, Boulder, Music Library has a large sheet music collection with approximately 150,000 items, including examples from the late 18th through the 20th centuries. The sheet music digitized and presented here was originally published between 1890 and 1922.
  
  
• Historic American Sheet Music Project (scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/)
  The Historic American Sheet Music collection presents 3,042 19th and 20th century pieces of sheet music drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University.
  
  
• The Historic American Sheet Music collection - 1850 - 1920 (memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncdhtml/hasmhome.html)
  A mirror site to the one listed above, this one is from the Library of Congress and has a slightly different search interface.
  
  
• Public Domain Music (www.pdinfo.com)
  Over 3,500 songs in the public domain in the U.S. For many of them, a source for the sheet music is provided. You can then check to see if it is locally owned, or LII it. Patrons may also purchase the source from the site.

Additionally, a search on the phrase "sheet music" in the LII brings up more than 30 other sheet music sites containing out-of-copyright music.

Last but not least, if the library user is willing to pay for the sheet music, there are many Internet sites such as Sheet Music Plus (sheetmusicplus.com) and Hal Leonard Online (halleonard.com) that sell it. Again, if the music is new, this is probably the only option. As you assist library users with these types of questions, you will become familiar with what is available in your library's book collection and on the Internet. Questions you cannot find the answers to can be referred to your headquarters library or to a reference center.

Quotations

Finding the correct wording and exact source for quotations can be one of the most difficult jobs for reference staff. Some quotes are too obscure, too new, or so badly misquoted that you simply can't find them.

Online Sources

Because there are so many sources for quotations, the swiftest option is usually to do some kind of online search for them. There are a lot of places on the web where quotes are collected. The problem with using them is the issue of reliability. Here are some free quotation databases that you might find useful, and are likely to be mostly reliable:

• Internet Public Library: Quotations (www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/ref63.00.00)
  A collection of annotated links to all kinds of quotations, including the 1919 edition of Bartlett's and the 1996 edition of the Columbia World of Quotations.
  
  
• Quotations Page (quotationspage.com)
  Searchable database of several quotation resources on the Internet.
  
  
• Quoteland (quoteland.com)
  Arranged by topic, including "literary" and "humorous", includes advertising slogans, and television and movie scripts. Searchable.
  
  
• Quoteworld (quoteworld.org)
  A collection of over 15,000 quotations that can be searched by title, author, quote, or key words.
  
  
• Simpson's Contemporary Quotations: The Most Notable Quotations 1950-1988 (www.bartleby.com/63/)
  Online version of the 1988 edition of the print work. More than "10,000 quotations from over 4,000 sources, organized into 25 categories and 60 sections."

Of course, you can also always use a search engine like Google just to look for the key words or phrases that the library user has provided. It's helpful to use the word quotation (or quotations) as the first term for the search. If you don't find it, use the same strategy as you do for poems, and try synonyms and variants of words. You'll want to be sure the source is reliable, ideally by verifying it elsewhere.

Print Sources

Two of the quotation handbooks most often found in libraries are Bartlett's Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett and Stevenson's Home Book of Quotations by Burton Stevenson. These two works are classics in the field, and both are useful to have, since there are significant differences between them. Stevenson's is larger and includes more quotations, but it does not duplicate all the ones found in Bartlett's, so if you have both of them you will often need to check both sources.

Print collections of quotations use two basic approaches to the almost infinite number of quotations in both English and other languages out there. One of them uses a subject approach, such as Stevenson's, the Columbia Dictionary of Quotations and many others. The other approach, as exemplified by Bartlett's and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, is to arrange the quotations by author. Each approach to quotes has its pros and cons. Look for yourself and compare. Try searching for a well-known quote such as "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue," first spoken by the Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). Quotations, often pithy and wise, are fascinating.

If you need quotes on a particular topic, or don't know the author of your quote, it can often be easier to begin with Stevenson's or the Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. If you do know the author, it can be much faster to start with Bartlett's or an Oxford Dictionary. In fact, there are whole books of quotes that limit themselves to Shakespeare or the Bible. Of course, if you have them in your library familiarize yourself with them. You will give better, faster service if you do.

People often remember the sense of a quotation, but not the exact words. It's not uncommon for someone to remember every word of a quotation incorrectly but still have the meaning right. How do you find a quote like that? There are a couple of ways to handle this. You can use a subject arrangement, like Stevenson's or the Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, and scan the quotations on that subject looking for one that seems to say the same thing. You can also think of synonyms for key words in the quote and use them as search terms in both print and online sources.

At over 2,800 pages, Stevenson's has an excellent key word index, as well as an Index of authors that gives birth and death dates and occupations. Other subject or thematically organized dictionaries, such as the Columbia at 1092 pages, do not. Quite often you will find simply an index of sources, such as in the Columbia Dictionary, or an index of authors, as in the Times Book of Quotations at 800 pages. The Times Book also has a "list of themes" in the opening pages, but this section of five pages hardly takes the place of Stevenson's "index and concordance," at just under 400 pages.

But—and this is a big "but"—the main problem with Stevenson's is that the last revised edition was published in 1967, and hence it does not have more recent quotes.

In contrast to Stevenson's, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is updated and published more frequently. The seventeenth edition appeared in 2002. Bartlett's, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (ODQ), and many others are arranged by author. These two works have true, highly-detailed key word indexes. For instance, Bartlett's Sixteenth Edition has a 600-page index, while the ODQ has close to 300 pages. Thus, author-driven quotation dictionaries have definite advantages over the subject-driven books. However, be aware that newer editions of Bartlett's have quotes dropped from older editions to make room for new material, so it may be worthwhile to check more than one edition.

Stevenson's and Bartlett's are good examples of quotation dictionaries and classics in the field. However, there are many others. A quick search on the bibliographic database First Search produced 487 "hits," although some of these "hits" are duplicates. Also, many of these dictionaries limit themselves to specialized fields such as humor, chemistry, physics, sports, economics, and politics.

If your library has a number of different kinds of quotation dictionaries, you have a good chance of finding a quotation if it is reasonably well known. The more obscure ones take time, diligence, and generally a large collection to track down to an authoritative source. In terms of the better known, general quotation sources, however, it is very important that you get to know them by both format and content. You may have to search through several different volumes to find the right quote. Contents can and do vary.

Poems, songs, and quotes are frequently asked questions that can be tough to track down. Often one or more elements of information provided to you are not right. Remember that the state systems' Reference Centers maintain files of questions, including sheet music and many texts and sources of poems and quotations. Don't hesitate to call the one serving your library for a file check.

What to Do Next

• On the top left of this page, click the "Assignments" link.
• Take the quiz.
• Do the assignment.