Subject Guides: Music 510: Band Literature: Research Help

Citation Help

RefWorks This link opens in a new window The new RefWorks 3.0 lets you save and share an unlimited number of references, full-text, and other research materials. Generate bibliographies and citations and integrate with either Word or Google Docs.
Chicago Manual of Style Online This link opens in a new window
17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style

Music Encyclopedias

Preferred Music Encyclopedias

Classical Music Reference Library (ASP) This link opens in a new window Classical Music Reference Library brings together more than 30,000 pages of essential reference materials, spanning the entire history of Western classical music, in a unified online database. Included are the authoritative reference titles Baker\\'s Dictionary of Music, Baker\\'s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and Baker\\'s Student Encyclopedia of Music.

MusRef: An Online Guide to Print and Internet Resources for Music and Dance MusRef is a site devoted to music and dance bibliography and reference. The site consists of five main features: An online bibliography of music and dance bibliographies and reference sources (both print and online), A blog devoted to music and dance bibliography and reference, Basic introductions to reference tools intended to help students understand how reference sources can guide them to appropriate research materials, Links to unpublished bibliographies, A corresponding Facebook page designed as a forum for interested librarians, scholars, and students. At present the bibliography includes more than 7,300 bibliographies and reference sources (both print and online), approximately 1,880 of which are annotated with critiques on use, coverage, organization, and pros and cons (click here for guidelines on writing critiques).

Oxford History of Western Music This link opens in a new window The Oxford History of Western Music is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the rich and diverse tradition of Western music. Starting with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago, Taruskin sweeps across centuries of musical invention and European intellectual history to provide a nuanced and stimulating historical account. He combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, illustrating how the music itself works and how contemporaries heard and understood it. He also describes how the context of each stylistic period – key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events – influenced and directed compositional practices.
Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window Indexes the full text of the revised second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the authoritative encyclopedia for all aspects of music. Includes links to digital sound, images, and related sites. Updated quarterly and annually. We have 5 simultaneous users.
Oxford Bibliographies Online: Music This link opens in a new window Oxford Bibliographies in Music combines the best features of a high-level encyclopedia and a traditional bibliography in a style tailored to meet the needs of today's online researchers. Each article, written and reviewed by top scholars in the field, is rich with citations and annotations, expert recommendations, and narrative pathways to the most important works for virtually all areas of music.
Oxford Reference Online - Performing Arts This link opens in a new window Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from one of the world's biggest reference publishers into a single cross-searchable resource. The Core Collection contains over 100 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. It is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of these books, giving subscribers unprecedented access to a comprehensive information resource. Also includes access to Oxford Digital Reference, a collection of 17 ebooks covering The Renaissance, Dance, Global Change, The Reformation, Byzantium, Theatre and Performance, The Enlightenment, Economic History, Evolution, Ancient Egypt, Food and Drink in America, The Middle Ages, American Literature, Latinos and Latinas in the United States, British Literature, Linguistics, and Children's Literature.

Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990 An A-Z biographical reference that focuses on individual artists and groups in all popular styles active from 1990 to the present, including those in rock, rhythm and blues, rap, country, electronica, jazz, vocal and classical. Features include select discographies, bibliographies, a glossary of musical terms, and other information. Also features appendix essays on various topics including the music industry, rap, and grunge.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture Includes more than 2,700 signed essays ranging from 500 to 2,500 words, written by subject experts and edited to form a consistent, readable, and straightforward reference. Entries include subject-specific bibliographies and, where appropriate, photographs and textual cross-references to related essays.

African American Music Reference (ASP) This link opens in a new window African American Music Reference from Alexander Street Press offers comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online (ASP) This link opens in a new window The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. It includes more than 9,000 pages of material, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world.
Oxford Language Dictionaries Online This link opens in a new window Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (OLDO) features fully searchable, completely comprehensive bilingual dictionaries, and unique study materials that provide extra help with learning and using an expanding range of languages. Offering over 4 million words, phrases and translations in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. OLDO also features native speaker audio pronunciation - allowing you to hear how words actually sound. More than just a dictionary, OLDO offers a complete suite of language learning support materials for users of all levels: click-through verb tables and pronunciation charts, explanations of grammatical terms, hundreds sample letters, CVs and resumes, notes on life and culture, guidance on grammar and idiomatic usage, extensive links to other sites for further research, and more.

Other Encyclopedias

Other Useful Encyclopedias

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 22 million articles (over 4 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. This resource is great for gathering background information that will have to be independently substantiated using other sources. Wikipedia has the potential to be a fantastic starting point for research, but requires additional work on the part of the researcher to critically evaluate the accuracy, currency, and possible bias(es) of the information presented there.

World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online This link opens in a new window World Biographical Information System Online is the most comprehensive biographical database available, providing short biographical information on 4 million people with a historical coverage from the 4th century BC to the present. It contains 3.85 million digital facsimile articles from more than 3,700 reference works, including biographical information on 2.3 million people worldwide. Access to the digitized full-text articles at BYU is limited at present to America, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), and Scandinavia.
Britannica Online This link opens in a new window Britannica Online is one of the most comprehensive, authoritative information databases on the Internet. It contains three encyclopedias, Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica Student Encyclopedia, and Britannica Elementary Encyclopedia. Itis continually updated to provide the most current information possible. Access to over 150 full-text journals is included at no additional cost with subscriptions to Britannica Online. Britannica Online features include: Over 73,000 articles from the printed Encyclopedia Britannica including more than 8,500 articles that are not found in the print set, plus 7,000 articles from the Britannica Books of the Year. Links to over 300,000 related sites on the Internet, selected for content by Britannica editors. Over 17,000 illustrations, maps and graphics. Thousands of sounds, animations and video clips covering topics ranging from rainforests to the Holocaust.

Tutorials

These tutorials from the University of Western Florida may be helpful. Just think BYU when they say UWF. The principals remain the same!

Selecting and using keywords

Selecting relevant articles

What is a scholarly article?

Searching Google effectively

Evaluating Information

RADAR for source evaluation

RADAR Video from Brock University

RADAR Video from UTSC

When evaluating the quality of an information source, the acronymn RADAR can be useful:

Rationale

Authority

Date

Accuracy

Relevance

Here are some questions to ask yourself for each category:

Rationale - What is the rationale, or purpose, of the resource? Is it to inform, entertain, etc? Is the purpose clearly outlined in the foreword or introduction? Is the work's audience an expert in the field or a layperson?

Authority - Who is the author of the work, and what are his/her credentials? Who published the work - a scholarly press, a commercial publisher, or is it self-published? If it is an online resource, can you determine who the author is?

Date - How current is the information? Is the age of the publication likely to affect the conclusions drawn by the author?

Accuracy - Does this work present you with high quality information? Was the information reviewed by editors or subject experts before it was published? Was it fact-checked? How do you know? Do the citations and references support the author's claim?

Relevance - Is your topic treated as the main subject, or is it peripheral? Does the information support or disprove your thesis? Is the resource useful to your research need?