ILA 101: Researching musicians / Professor Brady (Fall 2005)

Below are listed library resources that will help you to locate biographical and critical information about popular musicians since the 20th century. Different resources may be more of less helpful for each of you, so check them all out. Ultimately it is up to you to decide when you have located enough information about your musician; too much is never enough!

(P)research

Before you dive into the databases and start searching, think about what kind of articles you expect to find. Who is your artist and what has he or she meant to popular entertainment? Consider the following:

• It has been said that, "Death is a good career move." Not only does an obituary spark interest in a celebrity such as a musician, but it also allows the scholarly world to view the musician's life as a whole. This makes it easier to write about someone, and to measure his or her impact on the entertainment world. So, the deader your artist, the more easily you will find complete, in-depth articles.
• Although it is good to be dead, being lively in the first place is a huge help: those musicians who are also active celebrities tend to stay in the public eye more often. This means that there is more daily journalism written about them. And the greater an artist's societal impact, the more likely you are to find scholarly articles written about that artist. Madonna has been an influential and controversial cultural figure, Jerry Garcia was inextricably tied to the 1960s counterculture hippie scene, and Johnny Cash is hailed as a powerful influence not just in country music, but in American music overall. So, the more visible / influential your artist , the more easily you will find journalism-type articles (newspapers, newsmagazines).

Call numbers

Browsing the shelves is a simple, powerful method for finding materials on your topic. You can quickly evaluate the scope of a book by checking its table of contents, index and bibliography.

Hewes Library contains a relatively small collection of materials regarding modern popular music and musicians. There is little chance of finding an entire book on your artist, which means you need to think in more general terms: not just Johnny Cash, but country Western; not just Jim Morrison, but rock and roll.

Another side effect of our small music collection: browsing the shelves becomes simpler and smarter still. The exact real estate you will want to survey depends upon your exact topic, but here are a few good places to start:

M	Music
ML	Literature on music
ML 100 - 107	Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. General works
ML 198 - 200.6	History and criticism. America
ML 3469 - 3481	History and criticism. Popular music. America

To see a brief outline of the entire Library of Congress classification system, click here.

Remember that these call numbers are in effect throughout the Library: whether you are looking for a book to check out, an encyclopedia to leaf through, or a video to watch, M always means Music.

Reference resources in Hewes Library

Take advantage of the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference materials that are designed to explain a topic from the foundation up. You will find the resources below, among others, in the Reference Collection on the Main Level.

• The New Grove dictionary of music and musicians (2d ed.; 29 vol.) REF ML 100. N48 2001
• The New Grove dictionary of American music (4 vol.) REF ML 101. U6 N48 1986
• Popular musicians (4 vol.) REF ML 105. P66 1999

Online resources

Listed below are several online databases that you may use to locate biographical information about your artists. Notice that none of these databases specializes in music: most of them are general, or at the very most they specialize in American history.

The obvious search phrase is your artist's name. But you can be creative, too: search your artist's name with other keywords to help you focus on a certain aspect of your artist (such as "Sinatra and mafia" or "Clapton and son").

• Academic Search Premier
  EBSCOhost's academic-specific database indexes 8,000+ periodicals in all disciplines. 4,600 titles are full-text or full-image, and 3,500 are peer-reviewed. Coverage: generally since 1980, but back to 1965 for some titles. Title list.
• American National Biography
  Online version of the multivolume print set (find it in the Reference Collection at REF CT 213. A68), providing articles and bibiliographies on notable Americans.
• Current Biography
  Biographical essays of notable figures with an international scope. Coverage: since 1940.
• LexisNexis Academic
  Indexes, abstracts and provides some full-text access to 5,600+ news sources both national and international.
• New York Times 1851-2001
  Provides article images (.PDFs) of nearly every page and article of the New York Times, from its first issue as the New York Daily Times in 1851, through 2001: 3.4 million pages in all.
• WilsonSelect Plus
  Indexes and provides full-text articles from 800+ periodicals. Coverage: since 1994. Updated weekly.

Using the WWW

There is no shortage of websites out there about each of your artists. As with any topic, you need to evaluate the information that you find on these websites. For some assistance in this endeavor, check out our website evaluation guidelines.

When evaluating a website's reliability, the big question is, "Who made this website? Who is responsible?" The answer to this question tells you a lot about the information you will find there. If you have a fansite, or a site created by your artist's record company, be careful of opinion, undue praise, and selective editorializing.

Human resources: your local librarians

Hopefully, the ideas and resources above will help you to get started in your research. If you have any questions, comments or difficulties, please contact a librarian at the Reference Desk: (309) 457-2301.