World Arts and Cultures 22: Introduction to American Folklore Studies

When conducting fieldwork, consider Library resources as a partner in your research and writing. Library books, articles, and primary source tools can help you understand and provide context to your subject.

• Oral histories and interviews are often online through university oral history programs, and can provide examples of interviewing technique. There are also guides on conducting interviews that are both ethical and informative.
• Reference Sources can be good starting places for finding basic information on a subject, including major names, places, and issues. The Library has numerous print and online encyclopedias on folklore, oral traditions, and various cultures.
• Books take more time to write than articles, and are therefore slower to be published on some topics. However, they also can be more in depth and have more historical context.
• Articles can be of many different kinds: scholarly (or peer reviewed) academic articles; magazine articles from the popular press, and newspaper articles that are published around an event at a particular time. All of these supplement field work and can help you understand how a cultural performance is being written about (or not).
   

There are a number of library catalogs available to UCLA researchers. For further information on the catalogs and what they each contain, check out the Books tab in this guide.