Music 2501.1: Researching Hip-Hop (Spring 2009)  Tags: music research popular_culture history hip_hop  

Use Wikipedia and other web sites academically. Look for bibliographies and other lists of resources and links that add to your research.

Apply information, like keywords, names, or topics, found with your web searches to the Library's catalog and databases to find scholarly resources like books and journal articles.

Likewise, use information found in books and articles to find better web sources.

See Research Help for more ideas on how to make effective and efficient use of your time.

For contemporary topics and issues, Google and Wikipedia may even be essential resources. Many of the Hip-Hop pioneers actively monitor and manage the information in their Wikipedia entries.

Try other search engines.

Find Websites - A guide to becoming a better web searcher from UC Berkeley. 

Keep in mind that:

• Search Engines only retrieve a portion of the information available on the web. Sometimes only a small portion.

A lot of useful information is not freely available on the web. It is proprietary, meaning someone--an author, a publisher, or institution--owns the information. More about the Invisible Web. 

• Not all digitized information is created equal.

You need to critically analyze and evaluate the information you intend to use.

• Not all information has been digitized.

There are still BOOKS in the Library. And other print and analog resources that do not exist on the Web.