Rap music has been infusing itself into popular culture for over twenty years. It surfaced at New York street parties and has risen to an international phenomenon. Rising alongside the rap music movement was a new culture known as Hip Hop, which encompass new dance styles, such as Break dancing, new art styles, such as graffiti, a distinct language, and a new style of dress—all unique to Hip Hop culture.
Rap music and Hip Hop culture can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad: the two have grown and melded to rival other musical cultures. Recognizing this, a Case Western Reserve University Librarian has initiated the creation of a prototype database that will centralize access to known, published resources that document Hip Hop culture. This database is now publicly available on the World Wide Web as a searchable collection.
To learn more about the scope of the collection, click here.
There is currently no other resource available electronically focusing on such bibliographic content. Such an online bibliographic database of popular culture has not been fully explored, and this vehicle could provide a foundation or benchmark for further discovery. In the future, this database could include images, sounds, and other audible/sensory components—video, flash movies, tutorials, and so on. The database has been developed with the assistance of students from the Future Connections Program. The Future Connection Program is a collaborative venture between University Circle institutions and the Cleveland Municipal School District. Students spend eight weeks between an internship at a cultural institution and a local business. The program integrates learning and work experiences, and promotes skills that are necessary for future academic and career achievement. For more information on this program, please go to the following URL: http://www.universitycircle.org/uci_te_future_connect.shtml
Professional organizations, such as the American Library Association
(ALA), are actively creating initiatives that include programs that
expose young people to librarianship as a career. Special attention has
been given to attracting people of color to the profession. At Case
Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library, we are coordinating
the database project with Future Connections students in an effort to
combine research skills and data collection with popular culture. This
effort will expose high school students to various research professions
(i.e. Librarian, Curator, and Archivist) and the many mediums involved
in finding, accessing, collecting, and describing information