For the last few years I’ve intended to start work on an annotated bibliography of book-length academic studies focused on hip hop. Because such projects can be quite tedious, it’s been easy to put off but I’m feeling the need to connect my hip hop blogging and my academic background and so I’ve launched Hip Hop Research as a way of kickstarting the project.

I’m going to keep things fairly simple at first and then build as I go.

In addition to some initial book posts, I’ve also posted a downloadable version of a paper I wrote for a collection development class I took a few years back while earning my MLS.

It’s definitely a paper for a class but it may be useful for folks interested in what was out there and readily available at the time.

If you are an academic doing hip hop research, please contact me via the Hip Hop Research blog.

Though the annotated bibliography will focus on book-lenth projects, I’m open to posting or letting researchers guest post information on academic papers they’ve done for conferences or for publication.

I’m not planning on doing such research myself but I think such a project can help legtimize an emerging field while helping me tie some loose ends together.