Beginning the research process can seem intimidating, especially if it's your first time using archival materials like the items we have at the Center for Popular Music (CPM). However, the basic research process can be broken down into five steps
Picking a topic of interest to you can make the research process more enjoyable. For example, you could choose an artist, musical genre, or historical era you’re interested in learning more about. Please be advised that if an artist started their career more recently, there may be fewer resources about them.
Narrow down your topic’s main concepts into single words or short phrases. For example, if you’re writing a paper about sociopolitical themes in early American punk music, use keywords like “punk”, “punk rock”, “politics”, “social aspects”, “United States” or even something more specific like the name of a band (“Bad Brains”, “Dead Kennedys”), geographic location (“New York”, “San Francisco”), or historical event (“Cold War”).
First, search the Center for Popular Music’s catalog for any books that might have information on your topic. Make sure to select “Center for Popular Music” in the Collection menu before performing your search.
“All fields” is a keyword search, but you can also search by title, author, subject (Find a list of Library of Congress subject headings here), ISBN, year of publication, and even table of contents. We have reference works that cover multiple artists so a table of contents search may be useful for general background information.
The search fields automatically use the “AND” Boolean operator so if you want to narrow down your searches by using the “OR” or “NOT operators, you must type out your search in a single field (“Bad Brains” OR “Dead Kennedys” ; “Nick Cave” NOT “sculptor”) To get more results, you can also truncate search terms using “*”. For example, a search for “music*” will return results with the words “musical” and “musicology” as well as “music”.
You can also use the Center’s in-house Archivera database to search for archival items, such as sound recordings, sheet music, manuscript collections, periodicals, and even physical artifacts. The database has an advanced search feature, and you can browse specific collections too. You can save any items you find to your “Cart” as well as use the “submit request” button for more specific queries like if you wanted a scan of a particular photograph or an article in a periodical.
If you can’t find a specific sound recording or item in the database, please contact us at popular.music@mtsu.edu, and one of our staff members can assist you in your search.
In addition to the items in our reading room and archive, the CPM offers access to the Billboard Pro, Luminate/Music Connect, Pollstar, and Omdia databases for music industry research. Check out their specific pages in this LibGuide for more detailed information on how to use each database.
Important note: Items at the Center for Popular Music cannot be checked out and can only be viewed in our reading room. You can also only access Billboard Pro, Luminate/Music Connect, Omdia, and Pollstar on the reading room computers.
Evaluate the sources you've accumulated to see if they are relevant to your topic and cite them properly. This may lead to you changing your topic and gathering new keywords. It’s a good idea to save your sources in a citation manager, like RefWorks, Mendeley, or Zotero, so you can access them throughout the research, writing, and editing process.
“Citation Style Guides: Citation Managers and Generators.” James E. Walker Library, MTSU, library.mtsu.edu/c.php?g=943145&p=6798883. Accessed 2 June 2024.
Dalton, Logan, and Katie Glaeser. “Pop Culture Resources.” Knight-Capron Library, University of Lynchburg, 2021, libraryguides.lynchburg.edu/c.php?g=1119760.
“Keywords.” University Libraries Research Guides, University of Arkansas, 28 May 2024, uark.libguides.com/c.php?g=79013&p=9903198.
Purdue OWL. “Writing a Research Paper.” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University, 2024, owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/index.html.
