Congratulations to flautist Michael Lukin on the completion of the Song Index to the Dov Noy Collection in the Jewish National University Library (JNUL) in Jerusalem. This event will be of world wide interest to those who love Yiddish and Hebrew songs. The project involved meticulous cataloging that allows a searcher to find individual songs within a large number of Yiddish and Hebrew song anthologies and other works in this collection. Each song is searchable in the vernacular including keyword, title and author (composer and lyricist) searching. In addition, the incipit of the song, that is, the opening lines, or in some cases, some line of the refrain which may be more identifying to the song, are included in the record. Searchers may try typing in their title or even just a word of the title (keyword) to find which volumes this song may be in. The incipits are included as an “alternate title field”. The item record will also indicate which anthology the song comes from in the signature field. There is also a genres and origins fields, so there are geographic breakdown, sometimes to the village level, for searching song origins. Broader and narrower fields of geography are not available, but keyword searching may be able to pick up some of the broader geographic areas. The host item gives the bibliographic location (such as microform or in a printed book). There are over 13,400 individual songs indexed in this marvelous new research tool, including items from the Cahan book from YIVO, the Mlotek series published by Tara, the Hebrew University anthologies and much more. You can also “browse title” which will give a searcher all the versions of one song and the places they are published. Nice. Yes, Very Sweet.
To access the Song Index: First go to the Jewish National University Library Catalog:

http://jnul.huji.ac.il/eng/aleph500

At the Basic Search screen, use the pull down menu under “Select Database” (it’s the top box, on the left side).
Choose either Music: Yiddish Songs Index or Music: Hebrew Songs Index

It’s better to search in Hebrew and Yiddish script on your computer.
Special thanks to Gila Flam for hosting my visit to the library.