Music
The following databases and websites are good starting points for Music research
Databases
Naxos-Streaming Music Library 
Naxos is a streaming music library that contains 550,000 tracks of Classical, world, folk, and jazz music.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials 
There are over 15,000 articles on religious music in this database. ATLA is the main online resource for researching religion and theology.
Films on Demand
Films on Demand is a well organized collection of several thousand educational films on music, history, business, the humanities, psychology, science, and careers.
Academic OneFile
Academic OneFilehas the full-text of a few million of articles from all domains of knowledge.
OmniFile Full-Text Select
OmniFile is a social sciences and humanities database that only contains full-text articles.
ArticleFirst
ArticleFirst is a search interface that can link you to the articles you need. It searches descriptions of 23 million articles from all domains of learning.
Ebrary eBooks
This search engine exclusively searches our collection of 70,000 eBooks. A large portion of our music collection is eBooks.
Encyclopedia Britannica Academic Online
This general purpose encyclopedia is a great place to begin your research and obtain the background knowledge on musical styles or musicians that will make your research process go quicker.
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Nearly 400 specialized reference eBooks on all academic subjects to dig deeper into the background information. The musician dictionaries are in the Arts category.
History Resource Center -- World
This is a heavily-hyperlinked set of primary and secondary world history documents.
Websites
Scores/sheet music
Internet Music Score Library Project - A free repository of 79,000 and counting musical scores. This is a collaborative open source project to digitize and host public domain scores.
Sheet Music Consortium - The four partner institutions in this project are using the Open Archives Initiative: Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Which is a fancy way to say that they are trying to build a computer-generated index of all the sheet music projects on the web so that there can be one access point for all the sheet music projects on the web.
Inharmony - The digital score project of Indiana University. All scores have some relation to Indiana.
Sheet Music at Duke University Music Library - Collection of digitized sheet music with an emphasis on American music. Contains several thousand scores.
American Sheet Music 1820-1860 - "consists of over 15,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1820 to 1860. This collection complements an earlier American Memory project, Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music 1870-1885 as well as the Band Music from the Civil War Era and Sheet Music from the Civil War Era. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred and secular vocal music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and some music for band and orchestra. This collection of American and European composers provides an interesting chronicle of the developments in the music publishing business in the nineteenth-century United States."
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music - "consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its thorough documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music. The collection is especially strong in music spawned by military conflicts from the War of 1812 through World War I, and minstrel music is also well-represented." Maintained by the Sheridan Libraries at John's Hopkins University
Hymnary: A comprehensive index of hymns and hymnals - "Hymnary.org currently contains 5,033 hymnals and collections, entries on 1,034,837 texts and 36,060 tunes, bibliographical information from sources such as Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology and hymnal handbooks, full scores of many hymns, and 6,316 media files." You can even search by tune when you do not remember lyrics, title or other details. Created by Calvin College and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Cyber Hymnal 8,200 Christian hymns and Gospel songs from many denominations: Lyrics, audio, sheet music, pictures, history and more. Searchable, advanced Autoplay feature, free downloads.
Duke University Libraries Sheet music links - Extensive list of links to digital sheet music projects on the Internet. Many are put up by libraries and historical societies and many have a rather narrow focus, i.e. California music, Chopin only, hymns only.
Opera
The Aria Database - "a diverse collection of information on over 1000 operatic arias. Designed for singers and non-singers alike, the Database includes translations and aria texts of most arias as well as a collection of MIDI files of operatic arias and ensembles."
Lyrics
A-Z Lyrics Universe - Popular culture lyrics
The Lieder and Art Song Text Page - "an archive of texts used in 64,391 Lieder and other classical art songs... as well as in many choral works and other types of classical vocal pieces. The collection currently indexes 39,249 texts and includes 7,987 translations to English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages."
Composers
Bach Bibliography: For the global community of Bach scholars - "This database is compiled and maintained by Yo Tomita, School of Music & Sonic Arts, Queen's University Belfast with the generous assistance of his contributors."
ClassicalNet: The internet's premier classical music source - "features more than 7500 files including more than 5200 CD, SACD, DVD and Book reviews and over 5500 links to other classical music web sites."
Hector Berlioz website - "devoted to the music, life and works of this great figure. Created, funded and authored by two British academics, the site gives a panoramic view of Berlioz's life and art, and seeks to recreate the context in which he worked. It also presents regularly updated news on everything which concerns Berlioz: performances of his music world-wide, bibliography, discography, reviews of live performances and contributions from regular visitors to the site."
Prokofiev Page - devoted to Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Dr. Estrella's Incredibly Abridged Dictionary of Composers - "Dr. Estrella's Incredibly Abridged Dictionary of Composers is provided free of cost for your reference. The main focus of the dictionary is on composers of historical interest. To efficiently direct you to information on more contemporary composers, the timeline contains links to lists of the major composition award winners of recent decades."
Tchaikovsky-research.net - This collaborative project is like an encyclopedia on Tchaikovsky. It is a collaborative effort between enthusiasts and academics. This is especially good for finding citations to primary sources on Tchaikovsky including personal letters, journals entries, and writings.
Folk/Ethnic
Ethnomusicology - Maintained by the University of Washington Libraries
Folklife Sourcebook - A directory created and maintained by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Searchable database of organizations that study, archive, fund, sell or are otherwise involved with American folk culture. Includes museums, societies, libraries, and philanthropic groups many of whom are digitizing their collections.
Smithsonian Folkways - The Smithsonian Museum's collection of folk music from around the world. Besides the media they sell, there are streaming radio stations, podcasts, biographies, video, and music samples.
American Memory Project - The portal to access the Library of Congress' collections of digitized music, literature, letters, photography, maps and much more. Feels a little like a treasure hunt because there is a lot of valuable resources here, but it can be a journey to find them.
PBS Jazz - The award winning multi-part documentary on Jazz.
General
All-Music Guide - devoted to the music of popular culture
Music Resources on the World Wide Web - Maintained by the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University
Worldwide Internet Music Resources - Maintained by the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, Indiana University School of Music
Music History
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project - "find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound."
Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (2nd ed.) - "describes the full breadth and depth of Canada's musical culture, including the historical and current aspects of popular, folk, religious, concert and other forms of music."
Internet Public Library - Music information provided by the IPL, "founded at the University of Michigan School of Information and hosted by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology."
Musical Theatre
Broadway: The American Musical - "a new six-part documentary series that chronicles the Broadway musical throughout the 20th century and explores the evolution of this uniquely American art form. The series, created by filmmaker Michael Kantor, draws on a wealth of archival news footage, lost and found television moments, original cast recordings, still photos, feature films, diaries, journals, intimate first-person accounts, and on-camera interviews with many of the principals involved in creating the American musical."
Internet Broadway Database - "the official database for Broadway theatre information. IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today."
Musicals 101 - "The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film"
