Searching for Reviews on MusicWeb International - Some Hints
by Paul Serotsky

For reasons that are largely historical, MWI’s reviews archive is not a database structure, but a simple hierarchy of storage folders containing a mixture of reviews and periodical indexes. Consequently, there is no “easy” way to dig out reviews of given works or of given performers. You have to rely on the standard Internet search engines. Consistent formatting standards and “tag” strings would make this type of search relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, there are none – for largely historical reasons!
 
The following notes describe the methodology I have developed for my own use when building a Masterworks index of specific works or classes of works by a composer. Because there are no access restrictions to the MWI archive, anybody can use (or adapt) it to extract their own indexes. Folk with less ambitious researches in mind may also find it useful – just “cherry pick” the bits that you need.
 
Please note that these are not tablets of stone! If you find any faults, or can suggest any improvements or additions, please do let us know.

For simple searches, or ones where you can identify a near-unique characteristic (eg an unusual composition title or rare composer/performer) the MWI search facility (the “Search” tab near the top of most pages) is fine.

As soon as you start looking for commonly named works, oft-recorded composers or performers, you will get rather more results than you bargained for, and many of these will be “false” (in the sense that they have nothing to do with what you’re trying to find).
 
In cases such as this, using Google directly via its homepage gives you more power and control, and that's what this article is about.
 
Setting up a Search
Go to Google's homepage and click “Advanced Search”.
 
In “Search within a site or domain:” enter http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev
This limits the search to the MWI reviews pages.
 
In “Results per page:”, select 100 (the maximum allowed) from the drop-down list. This is useful if you are going to store the results offline (see below), because it minimises the number of search results page.
 
Use the boxes displayed above “Need more tools?” to define the search. Of course, and obviously, exactly how you use these depends on what you’re looking for, but the following tips might be useful:
 
You can use double-quotes in any box to specify an exact string (of two or more words) while “one or more of these words:” is useful where a work’s title may be quoted in different ways, e.g. Stravinsky –  Sacre/Rite, or Petrushka/Petrouchka, “no. 1”/First, with (say) Brahms Symphony in “all these words:”

Your search will inevitably return some spurious results. If there are enough to be a real nuisance, use “any of these unwanted words:” to whittle out those caused by a particular word or string (but be aware of the proverbial caveat concerning the baby and the bathwater!).

Performing a Search
When you’ve got your criteria ready, click the “Advanced Search” button at the foot of the frame. Depending on the results you get, you may need to cycle back through “Advanced Search” a time or two to refine the criteria.

When a cursory check suggests that you’ve got reasonably satisfactory results, go all the way to the very end. If (perish the thought!) there are several pages, go to the last page (for some reason best known to Google, it doesn’t yet provide “First” and “Last” page buttons!).

Once at the very end of the very last page, if you don’t see “repeat the search with the omitted results included”, use the browser “Back” facility to return to the first page. Otherwise, click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included” – the search will be repeated with all results displayed.
 
Saving the Results
At this point, you can of course just browse the results. However, if you are intent on building a comprehensive index, or there are just too many results for you to plough through in one sitting, it’s more convenient to save the results on your computer.
 
On the browser menu, select “Save Page As” (or equivalent) and from the “Save as type” drop-down list, select “Web page, HTML only”. If there are several pages in the search, it’s a good idea to store them in their own separate folder.

Display the next page, and repeat this procedure until you’ve stored copies of all the search results pages.
 
Hint: Sometimes it’s easier to get all you want by doing more than one search.
 
The Benefits of Saving Results
There is a nasty problem if you try to process a large set of results in more than one online session. At the start of your next session, you’ll have to repeat the search. The longer the interval between searches, the more likely it will be that you get a different set of results. This is most undesirable, because then you’ve no way of telling which results are the “old”, which are the “new”, and which of them you’ve already looked at in previous sessions.
 
If you save a large set of search results, you can process them in as many sessions as you like. Saving all the results up front gives you a consistent, “time-stamped” set that you can work through at your leisure. At the end of one processing session, you can simply make a note of the last result you dealt with, and start the next session with the next one along.
 
Alternatively, you can create a Word document, then copy/paste into it the list of actual results (i.e. without the blurb at the top and bottom of each page) from each saved search results file. The format in Word looks slightly different, but the required links are just as clickable, and you have the benefit of all the results being in a single file.
 
This simplifies your “work management”. In each new session, you start at the first result in the file. At the end of the session, you delete all the entries you’ve processed. This way, the file always contains only the entries that you haven’t yet examined, so you’re much less likely to “lose your place”, and you have the encouragement of seeing the file shrink!
 
Now, it’s “simply” a matter of trawling through all the results, opening any that look “promising”, and pulling out the required information into (say) a Word document.

Good luck and be patient!

Paul Serotsky

 
 
 
 

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