UC Campus Perspective

As promised, today’s blog features one of those databases mentioned but not discussed in detail in a previous blog entry. It seems appropriate to discuss JSTOR’s announcement regarding a massive addition to its scholarly journal content.

In yesterday’s issue of “Wired Campus” from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard wrote an article about JSTOR’s addition of journal content from before 1923.

Click the text above to view the article for yourself.

So what is JSTOR and where do you find it? If you attend a university that owns a subscription to JSTOR, then your school is paying for you to have unlimited access to scholarly journal articles in most academic fields of study. Music majors at the University of the Cumberlands have access to articles from 83 music journals, and now (depending upon the earliest publication dates of these journals) from as early as the year 1870.

Here is where you find JSTOR on the University of the Cumberlands website:

http://www.ucumberlands.edu/library/electronic/datasubject.php

As mentioned in an earlier post, when off campus you will be prompted to enter login information. Simply use your UC email i.d. and password at that point and you will be directed to JSTOR’s search engine.

Develop a list of keyword searches and you are on your way to peer-reviewed scholarly writings. After several years of using JSTOR to find great academic music articles, I have discovered a search technique that restricts searches to the 83 music journals contained within JSTOR’s holdings.

1) When you are taken to the search engine, immediately click “Advanced Search” before you type in keywords.

2) Once on the Advanced Search page, type in your keyword(s).

3) Then scroll down the page and check the box for your field of study. In my case, I check the box beside “music.”

These steps will often greatly reduce the number of hits you receive and direct you towards more pertinent information.

Be prepared – whenever conducting a keyword search – to constantly refine your list of search terms so that you are able to find the most relevant research. Be careful to use appropriate citations and always ask your professor to clarify the style of citations that they prefer. We are always happy to help and demonstrate proper citations.

Enjoy JSTOR now that it is half a million articles stronger!

Dr. Patrick Tuck is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of the Cumberlands. He holds a PhD in Music Theory with a trumpet performance minor from Louisiana State University.

Dr. Tuck is a member of the Southern Stars Symphonic Brass and is in demand as a soloist, clinician, and adjudicator. He performed E-flat Soprano Cornet with the SSSB at the 2010 Great American Brass Band Festival. While at UC, he has hosted and performed with trumpeters James West, Del Lyren and Rex Richardson. He is a member of the London Jazz Orchestra and the London Little Big Band. He also appears on the EMI Virgin Classics recording Healey Willan: Tenebrae Responsories as a member of the Choirs of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, and recordings by the choir of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Dr. Tuck’s current research interests include rhythm pedagogy, music of the late 19th century, and trumpet performance. He has presented papers on rhythm pedagogy with James R. Corcoran Jr. at Louisiana State University and the New Orleans Musicology/Theory Colloquium. He has also presented papers on the music of Brahms and Hugo Wolf at meetings of the CMS Great Lakes Chapter, the South Central Society for Music Theory (SCSMT), the New Orleans Musicology/Theory Colloquium, Southeastern Louisiana University, Lincoln Memorial University, College Music Society Southern Chapter, and at Vixen Muse, an international conference on the music of Hugo Wolf in November 2003. He has published numerous reviews in the Journal of the International Trumpet Guild and Music Theory Online and liner notes for recordings by Norem Brass and Friends and the Atlantic Brass Quintet.

He is a member of the Society for Music Theory, the International Trumpet Guild, Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honor Society, the College Music Society, the National Association for Music Education, the Kentucky Music Educators Association, and Delta Omicron Music Fraternity. He served for several years on the SCSMT executive and has served on membership and development committees for the International Trumpet Guild and the College Music Society.

After a summer of following a thread on an academic LISTSERV about the value of various online resources, my faith in existing peer-reviewed academic resources has been left intact. However, I have discovered some very productive uses for the relatively recent addition to our list of verbs: “Google.”

Teaching students to research in an online academic environment is not very much different than teaching you to use our university library on campus. One of my primary goals in this process is to guide you towards valuable and accurate resources that you can access quickly. You can then add new research verbs to your vocabulary. Music students at the university level can still Google it – especially when you make use of its http://scholar.google.com/ resource – which I just Googled. Here, you may find electronic versions of many of the books that your professors used in the past during our dissertation or thesis writing days. Instead of sitting between the stacks in the library with a pile of books beside us, you can access some of that stack online. The value of this online search tool is only going to grow. Of course academic research libraries are still incredible places to access rare and comprehensive items in virtually every field of knowledge. Take some time periodically to go to the stacks, there is nothing more fulfilling!

At the core of the discussions I followed this summer was the concept of instant access to information. Well, here are five easy steps for our students to gain access to peer-reviewed (a blog post or more in itself) academic music writings. Use these so that you can GROVE IT!

1) http://www.ucumberlands.edu/

2) http://www.ucumberlands.edu/library/

3) http://www.ucumberlands.edu/library/electronic/datasubject.php

4) http://www.ucumberlands.edu/library/electronic/music/

5) Click on the resource of your choice. GROVE MUSIC ONLINE is our single most comprehensive online academic music encyclopedia. So music students, bookmark our electronic music database page (see step 4) and reduce the number of steps you require to GROVE IT!

Now if you scanned the pages as you went through these four steps, you would have also noticed JSTOR, Films on Demand, Proquest, and Ebsco. All of these searches can also be very valuable and I will discuss these in later posts. To give you a bit of a start: JSTOR is an incredibly quickly growing bank of academic journals. Like the articles in Grove Music Online, the information presented there is more likely to be accurate due to the process that it went through to get published in the first place.

University of the Cumberlands purchases these resources so that you may have quick access to the best and most up-to-date information in your field of study. Take a couple of minutes to find your database by subject and enhance the way you experience research at UC!

Note: If you are off campus, you will be prompted to enter a login i.d. and password. Use your UC email login to access these materials.

Enjoy!