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Music and Music Education Research Guide

Here you will find resources provided by Gottesman Libraries and beyond to support your research and learning in Music Education. Resources designated (CU) are accessible online through Columbia University Libraries.

Search Tips

Picking Key Words

  1. Use your research questions to pick out essential keywords: see the Venn Diagram on joining topics into a research focus.
  2. Find related terms and synonyms for each concept in your research question. for example:

art museums 

  • Cultural heritage

  • Museums

  • Galleries

Constructing Searches

Most search engines, including Educat+ and CLIO, use standard search language and symbols to convey searches:

  1. Boolean operators connect your terms: AND connects different topics together, OR connects related terms within each topic, NOT removes that search term from results. See the example below.

  2. Quotations: using quotation marks allows you to search for an exact phrase i.e. "Teachers College" instead of 'Teachers' and 'College'.

  3. Parentheses: help group sets of terms to delineate relationships within the search.

  4. Question mark: a question mark in a search has a similar function to an asterisk, but for only one letter i.e. 'wom?n' will capture woman and women.

  5. Asterisks: adding an asterisk at the end of a word will capture related words with the same root or base, i.e. 'philosoph*' will capture philosophy, philosophical, philosopher etc.

Example Search

(“art museum*” OR museu* OR galler*) AND (hiring OR recruit*) AND (divers* OR DEAI OR DEI) AND (manage* OR executiv* OR leader*)

 

Lincoln School Of Teachers College. Summer Demonstration. Recreation Program. (1939). Historical Photographs of Teachers College. Courtesy of Gottesman Libraries.