Information Services

Vinyl music catalogued

Over 100 diverse and unusual vinyl music recordings have been catalogued, making the collections more accessible for students and staff.

The recordings from the Reid Music Library collection, at the Main Library, are discoverable on the Library catalogue - DiscoverEd.

Image of vinyl cover

The Library holds an extensive collection of around 5000 vinyl album recordings, covering world, jazz, and classical music, which has been built up since 1967. The value of the collection lies in part in the fact that they are usually not duplicated in the Library’s CD collection, or in our subscription streaming services such as Naxos Music. In many cases the vinyl recording represents the best recording of a particular piece of music or an artist. To many people, vinyl recordings are far superior in quality to streamed versions, plus with a vinyl album there is the advantage of having printed sleeve notes as a source of valuable information.

Current cataloguing is focussed on LPs from the New World Record series anthology edition of the Music of the USA, with content ranging from African American folk songs to avant-garde orchestral music, along with titles from the jazz and world music collections.

All titles from the collection are available for borrowing, with access to the collection handled by staff at the Main Library Helpdesk. There is also a music listening room on Floor 2 of the Main Library where a high quality Numark turntable can be used, with headphones, to play the albums in our collection on site.

Until everything in the vinyl collection is added to DiscoverEd, you can access them using the AV catalogue.

Find out more about library resources for Music.

(Ed. this article was originally published on 6 Nov, 2018)