After getting a taste of original research using primary sources, undergraduates in the Researching Hip-Hop class shared their newfound knowledge April 29 in the form of beatboxing, turntabling, DJing and more.

About a dozen members of the music seminar showcased the foundations of hip-hop at a history fair and demonstration in the Robert Purcell Community Center. Students also displayed original materials from Cornell University Library that formed the foundation of the class, which was offered for the first time this spring.

Moina Snyder '09 said the event was intended to present the materials in an interactive way.

"It's a living culture; it can't be put in a box. It has to be explored in a way that's also living," she said. "This is part of history, [but] it's not in a book; it's in the streets."

About 125 students visited the hip-hop fair to watch demonstrations and learn performance techniques. On display were original fliers, album covers and photographs from the library's Hip-Hop Collection, which arrived in spring 2007 and was celebrated in a two-day conference last fall.

Those archival materials were central to the course curriculum, and lab sessions were held regularly in the library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the music library so that students could interact directly with the fliers, photographs and LPs they were studying.

"We want students and members of the public to learn from these rare artifacts that document the emergence of hip-hop culture," said Katherine Reagan, curator of rare books and manuscripts, who co-taught the class with Bonna Boettcher, director of Cornell's Cox Library of Music and Dance, and music professor Steve Pond.

Several students noted that the class marked the first time they had ever worked with artifacts or primary sources.

"Usually, you're looking at material ... that a thousand different people have already written about. This was a chance to work with new material that's just starting to be looked at academically," said Adam Spar '09, an English major. "To be able to actually go through and look at original collections -- that's a unique opportunity for undergrads."

Pond, who plans to teach the course again in the fall, noted that when professors are in charge of a class, they challenge students to find out what they already know. "In this case, they're not only finding out information, they're developing the questions in the first place," he said. "It requires professors to relinquish a degree of control over the knowledge, and that's an exhilarating prospect."

The emphasis on undergraduate research reflects the course's affiliation with the Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative, a program sponsored by the library and the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. It also is sponsored in part by the John S. Knight Institute.

"We wanted to provide students with a new way to learn about hip-hop's history, as well as teach skills that would help them become more expert researchers," Reagan said. "The students used their own research to understand how and why hip-hop emerged in the Bronx in the 1970s. Their creativity and expression surpassed our expectations for the course."

The students also interacted with two of the forces behind the collection, donor and author Johan Kugelberg and photographer Joe Conzo. Vijay Ravichandran '09 and Benj Gilman '10 both said they appreciated access to individuals as primary sources.

"We've learned that archives and research aren't just for professionals and grad students, and we can handle these things as undergrads. My word counts as much as a Ph.D.'s," Snyder said.

Gwen Glazer is a staff writer for Library Communications.