Cultivate curiosity. Success in finding new sources of inspiration depends on your attitude toward what you encounter. You know that you are onto something when you feel you need to know more about something or some aspect of something. Don’t ignore that little voice asking you to dig deeper.
Serendipity is your friend. Maybe at some point you’ve learned a very directed way of research. That works for finding a flight or even picking a research paper topic. But it doesn’t work here. You’ll find the best stuff by manufactured accident. In other words, your job is to position yourself in the right place to find the stuff that will spark your imagination.
There is no “end goal.” Of course you will need to set limits (see the next three maxims for more on that), and you will need to produce a creative artwork of some kind, but no one can tell you when the period of exploration should end. Instead, the idea is that you search until you are ready to start. And you might return to searching before you are finished. That’s all okay.
You know what you need, even if you can’t say what you need. The good news about searching in the service of a creative project is that you really to get to decide what is useful. You have a right to be decisive—this is for me and this is NOT for me. If you try to retain everything or be curious about everything, you will never stop looking. So trust yourself and decide.
Everything is useful at some point but not everything is useful right now. If you have spent hours aimlessly listening, watching, reading, you have not wasted your time. The thing that does not spark curiosity or inspiration today, may hang out in your brain to prove useful tomorrow (or next year). At a certain point you will probably want to switch directions or approaches to respond to right now so that you can finish the task in front of you. It’s a balancing act without a clear formula.
Everything is useful to someone but not everything is useful to you. This applies especially to the material on this LibGuide. I have given you some likely places to start, but I do not consider them ending spots, and neither should you. I suggest that you explore some of these resources, as they are probably more efficient routes than Google or YouTube, but don’t rely on them exclusively or definitively.
Streaming services and photographs of art. Because of rights restrictions there are many works of art, including music, visual art, film/ video, that you cannot access on the open web. We pay for you to have access as students of Towson—you just need to use your credentials. This is especially relevant for visual art, as rights to prints can be very restrictive. Look for links on the Audiovisual page.
A smaller, more contained place to search. Searching for inspiration through a Google search or even through a service like Spotify can be difficult because there is just SO MUCH STUFF and the search mechanisms are not very good because they are more focused on selling you material than answering your information need. The databases we have are focused on a single type of item or type of user and they are all about information, not commercialism. As a result you are much more likely to find what you need if your user profile matches that of the database.
Reference help from experienced researchers. We have a whole staff of people who want to help you find the things you need to do your work. You can schedule a 1:1 meeting with Mary Ranadive or Christina Gibson. You can email us. You can use the chat feature on our website. Or just show up at the reference desk on the 3rd floor of the library. If the person you ask does not know the answer to your question, they’ll make sure to connect you with someone who can help you.
Access to books and articles from around the world. Make use of the yellow “find it” button in the OneSearch system to see how to access books and articles. Towson University is in a consortium with all the public universities in Maryland, meaning that we have quick, easy access to most books or scores in the Maryland system. We can get these items to you in just a few days. Similarly, any article that we do not have but you want can be requested through Inter-Library Loan (ILL) and arrive in your email in-box within days. Books that are not available at TU or through the Maryland system can also be requested through ILL, which enables exchange among academic libraries throughout the world! Usually books arrive within a week or two. If you have any doubt about how to do this, reach out to a librarian.
