Guest Evaluation
During the course of the semester, we’ve had several guest speakers who came to discuss the process of research or their own personal research with us. While David Elliott first came with several sheets of the table of contents from music research journals to help prod our minds into generating new and/or improved topics, it was Kent Underwood who showed us how to access the NYU library catalog and beyond so that we could begin researching our various topics. While Gillian Anderson discussed with us the issue of authenticity involved in her research, Ted Warburton shared with us many doctoral theses to help us write our introduction to the Annotated Bibliography. There were pros and cons to our guest speakers. Most importantly, he showed us how Not to write. Gillian Anderson was one of the more interesting speakers but did not aid the class in their individual research projects unless one was studying up on film music or authenticity. Kent Underwood is the library divinity to whom we can address all sorts of research questions but at times failed to maintain the interest of the class due to all the handouts he passed out and some of the redundant processes involved in searching through the online NYU library catalog, BobCat. Music Reference and Research Materials is a difficult course to teach. Involving guest speakers was a fun way to promote class interaction with contemporary researchers and live reference sources.