The websites below are scholarly websites, created by experts in the field, and are different from what you'd locate through a simple Google search.
Search@UW, the search engine you see on the library homepage, searches all the holdings, physical and electronic, that you can access, both through UWM directly, or through other libraries in the UW system. This includes ebooks and online journal articles that you can access online through our subscriptions to databases and electronic journals.
To search for sources for your paper, spend some time thinking about the search terms you want to use. You may also want to use limiters to control the topics and formats of your results, for example limiting your results so that you only see electronic resources, or so that you only see books and article.
Some filters you might experiment with are:
1. Show Only > Online Resources. This will limit your results to things you can view online, including eBooks and articles we can access through our databases and subscriptions. This is helpful if you're unable to come to campus, but you may still want to also explore other resources like articles and book chapters that you can request and get delivered online
2. Topic > Music. This is most helpful if your search terms are getting lots of results that aren't about music at all.
3. Resource Type > Books, Book Chapters, Articles. This will eliminate things like videos and CDs that might not be what you're looking for at this stage in your research.
4. Show Only > Peer-Reviewed. This only works within articles, not with books, but it will limit only to certain scholarly journal articles. This can be helpful if you're getting a lot of things like reviews that aren't giving you historical information.
If you aren't having good results in Search@UW or want to go further, you can try using a music database that searches beyond what we have access to at UWM. One useful database is RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, which indexes all kinds of books, chapters, articles, and dissertations about music.
The library's databases include several focused on music and the performing arts. Some are entirely full-text, meaning they include access to the article itself, and others also include information about books and articles you may need to request from elsewhere. Some are focused on scholarly writings, and some include magazines and trade publications. All of them are helpful in exploring and identifying things you may want to read for your research.