Multimedia and music

Music collections

London's public library collections include a wide range of musical genres, classical, jazz, pop and rock as well as folk and world music and all in a variety of formats including:

• CDs and DVDs
• Vocal scores
• Orchestral scores

Each London public library collects the recordings of  the works of particular composers or in a particular genre so that across the capital much more is available to you than might be suspected by looking at the shelves in your local branch. The table below gives a guide to these specialisations:

The Barbican Music Library's Song Index is now available for on-line searching. The index includes printed anthologies of all types of song: pop, rock, folk, jazz and musicals, plus a smaller number of 'classical' songs and opera arias.  The index contains over 55,000 entries so far and new anthologies are added to it on a regular basis. Click here to find out more>>

To help you locate music collections CECILIA is a national catalogue of music library holdings, which includes public libraries, conservatoires and other significant collections.

In addition ENCORE is a national catalogue showing the location of vocal and orchestral sets available for loan to your choir or orchestra via your local library.

Ask at your local library about the interlibrary lending service to obtain materials from other libraries (there may be a charge for this).

 Back to public libraries page