Search tips for the Musicpic database

The  icon gives an alphabetical listing of terms in the fields Originator and Keywords.

Enter your search term in the Freetext field if you want to search in all fields. Enter your search term in the appropriate field if you want to search in a specific field or choose term from Index. The descriptions, terms and keywords are mostly in Swedish but we are in the process of making the database bilingual.

Use the $ character as wildcard. For example, cello$ gives records with terms cello, cellos and cellist.
$cello$ gives also terms violoncello, violoncellos, violoncellist.

The Originator field refers to photographer, photo studio, or artist in case of art reproductions.

You can search on date (year) in the Date field, on exact date as well as on "greater than" or "less than".

• for exact year, enter the year with 4 digits, e.g. 1910
• enter <1910 to get records with a date earlier than 1910. The search term <=1910 includes 1910 as well
• enter >1910 to get records with a date later than 1910. The search term >=1910 includes 1910 as well


Keywords describe the pictures with terms such as “musicians” or “portrait photographs”. Some of these are written in natural language so you can try out any word, but also controlled vocabulary has been used. You can check keywords in Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms, and Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II: Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms. Swedish terms can be searched in YSA/ALLÄRS/MUSA/CILLA. This vocabulary is Finnish/Swedish, so you can enter words in both languages. Notice that all records in the database have not yet been described with English keywords.

Search terms in different fields can be combined with AND or OR.
Search terms within same field can be combined with AND, OR or NOT.

You can choose format of the search result: text or thumbnails. As only 102 pictures are in digital format, you are likely to get a better result choosing text.

Click on Search to submit the query.

The result list shows 10 records at a time. Click on to get the following page, and on to get the previous page.