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The premier online source is Grove Music Online, which has the full-text electronic versions of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd Edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), The Oxford Companion to Music (2002), and The Oxford Dictionary of Music (2006). Access to the site is by subscription only. However, if you belong to a public library that has a subscription to Grove Music, you can access the site via the barcode on your library card. Many university libraries also have subscriptions to this site.
All the other sites listed on this page are publicly accessible, trustworthy and particularly useful for researching articles on classical music-related subjects and finding public domain images. When using web sites not listed here, particularly amateur web sites and anonymously edited commercial database sites like IMDb, it is a good idea to check the facts in a second source if at all possible. Such sites can often contain errors and are generally not internally referenced. Other sites to be wary of:
- BBC Music – This sub-site of the BBC posts "biographies", which are mirrors of Wikipedia and reader-generated reviews.
- bach-cantatas – Their biographies can be useful as a short-term solution but some of them are lifted from Wikipedia or very closely paraphrased from the artist's (or their agent's) website.
- NME online version – Virtually all the biographies are lifted from Wikipedia or are reader-generated. They're not from the print edition of NME.
Apart from the works listed in the Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive sections, and full text books published prior to 1923 on Google book search, the texts are generally all in copyright and must not be pasted verbatim or closely paraphrased in articles. Note that direct English translations (even your own) of copyright foreign texts are likewise protected as derivative works and can only be briefly quoted or closely paraphrased under "fair use".