A copy of PPT slides from the Public Communications Librarians Fall 2019 Research Success Meet-Up presentations at Newhouse 3, Room 141 (Sept 16, Sept 19 & Sept 20, 2019)
A link below to the "What Students Need To Know" handout, SU Office of Academic Integrity. You can also view a copy SU's full Academic Integrity Policy (PDF)
Much television programming, especially entertainment programming, may not be systematically collected by libraries. However, some databases are very strong sources of a variety of media transcripts, primarily covering public affairs and news related TV shows (not general entertainment shows). Such as these databases:
News, business, and legal sources covering world news and companies, and including U.S. Supreme Court decisions, state, federal and international law, regulations, and law reviews.
This specialized database will help only those students whose crosses over into the U.S. federal government, any of the three branches (also contains vast quantities of traditional government documents, but these can be filtered out so as to only look at YouTube, Tweets and Facebook posts coming from persons, agencies and departments in Washington DC):
At high levels of detail for some platforms, producers and networks as well as media measurement organizations can at times be very guarded as to what information is released (e.g., at most levels of close detail - Nielsen, who measures TV program ratings, does not license that access to colleges and universities). But these are some examples of databases that offer some levels of top line audience information. SRDS covers the most different types of platforms:
Nielsen offers some free information about the media measurement efforts on their website, but this is relatively limited in scope.
Below are links leading to commonly defined distinctions between primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary sources. If you are working with a source type and unclear into which one or more categories that item falls, ask your Professor or a Librarian.
Here are links to definitions, with examples
Syracuse University Libraries Research Process Subject Guide - Primary v. Secondary Sources
Cornell University Library - Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources: A Quick Guide
Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science by Joan M Reitz (ABC-CLIO)
Offers excellent definitions of primary source, secondary source, and tertiary source. Click on "p" "s" and "t," respectively, and scroll down to those definitions.
A quick reference table that provides an overview of some basic descriptive classifications assigned to various types of periodicals. Note that search result refinement options at either left or right column of many databases - frequently allow narrowing of results according to these types (or equivalents).
Need help on formatting the sources you cite in your academic writing (e.g., APA, MLA, etc.) or want access to a full-fledged online bibliographic management system-like "RefWorks" or "Zotero?" Visit the SU Libraries Citation Support website.
For stylistic guidelines for journalists particularly -SU Libraries also offers from Associated Press the:
Journalists at Politico in 2018 have launched, "Is It True? - A Fake News Database." That effort compiles online news that is a hoax, doctored or impostor news publications. Politico accepts submissions from the public of news content falling into these categories. For more information, visit Is It True? About This Project.
For well organized information gathering of news coverage. Important note: News databases like Access World News, Nexis Uni and Proquest News and Newspapers, while primarily collecting text from newspapers, also harvest article text from cross sections of news websites, blogs - and Access World News does pull in some new website video (with mostly a U.S. focus for that video content).
News, business, and legal sources covering world news and companies, and including U.S. Supreme Court decisions, state, federal and international law, regulations, and law reviews.
Circulating books on journalism, mass media, television, radio, & film reside primarily on Bird Library’s 5th Floor. Use basic and advanced searches in the SU Libraries SUMMON search engine or, alternatively, classic catalog, to determine specific titles and locations of interest that are related to research about media platforms, a theory, an organization, person, place or technology. Photography books are shelved in the Carnegie Library (call numbers beginning with TR and oversize TR).
Want to explore some specific large SU Libraries ebook collections directly? Try ebook databases such as these:
When searching within the SUMMON search environment, to limit results to ebooks, add to your search these two refinements, in combination (refinements can be specified either prior to, or after, entering search teminology):
If you are interested in books other libraries have in their collections, the database that can help you identify which libraries have those books, outside of SU - is called Worldcat . Keep in mind that for book titles you need that are not at SU - you can submit the reference information for such books to the library's interlibrary loan service, Illiad, to get free short term access to such books
A concise list of SU Libraries subscription databases in media studies and news that represent (or otherwise contain) significant online video, audio or image content. Kanopy, recently added, in addition to non-fiction and documentary video, also contains numerous U.S. and international feature films. Docuseek2 is also well known for containing a wide array of documentaries, often from independent distributors:
See also freely available news video searching available via:
See also the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" for systematic archiving of a wide variety of website URLs. This can be a very effective tool for looking back at historical coverage of a public figure or related events on specific known websites. Archiving includes images. Be aware that over time, interactive features on these sites connected to embedded audio, slideshows, streaming video, database driven polling, etc. may not function. But Wayback Machine remains a good tool for digital news platforms which are only rarely literally "collected" by libraries.
ProQuest database will be excellent for getting to a lot of current magazine article text with mention events or public figures. However, here are additional databases to consider (some with deep historical coverage):
When seeking a bit more information regarding media or specific media platforms, or regulation(s) of this platforms, or advertising in relation to those media, in addition to relatively recent books and book chapters being superb in discussing those broad landscapes [to identify such books - use SU Libraries SUMMON search engine] , additionally - often you may find helpful discussion about that in recent scholarly articles (or also often in trade publications [aka: industry magazines]). These are helpful databases below for locating such discussion within one or both types of articles. For instance, enter the proper name of a media platform as a whole (either the brand name - i.e., "Twitter," "Youtube," et al or the platform's generic name - such as "newspapers" or "television" or "social media," etc.) AND combine that with search words or phrases such as
Communication Source - is a primary collection of articles and other references to published literature in all sub-disciplines of public communications, including advertising and public relations. Covers articles from scholarly peer-reviewed journals, as well as trade journals and other periodicals in additional related fields such as media studies, broadcasting, journalism, linguistics, rhetoric and more. This database merges together two previously named resources, formerly known as "communication & mass media complete" (ebsco) and "comabstracts" (sage).
Business Source Elite - Full-text coverage for nearly 1,100 business publications and economics journals, including nearly 500 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 1,800 journals. Business Source Elite contains full text from the world's top management and marketing journals including the Harvard Business Review.
ProQuest - Enormous repository of articles from newspapers both recent and deeply historical, scholarly journals, popular magazines, business/trade journals, and more.
JSTOR - Full-text archive of scholarly publications in mathematics, science, and the social sciences. Moving wall principle means coverage of journal titles here ranges between 1 and 3 to 5 years behind the current date. Currency varies one journal title to the next.
Scopus - The world's largest abstract and citation database, with over 33 million records. Its coverage of Scientific, Technical, Medical and Social Sciences literature includes 15,000 peer-reviewed journals, 1,200 open-access journals, 500 conference proceedings, over 600 trade publications, and 200 book series. Scopus also covers 386 million quality web sources, including 22 million patents. Its most powerful feature may be its tracking of subsequent citation to earlier articles for the publications it contains. A great tool for compiling a scholarly "literature review" on any topic (remember this database for any research project "after" COM 107, in any course at SU, where the objective is gathering relevant academic articles).
Two additional multidisciplinary scholarly journal databases that will tend to offer excellent results for all disciplines covered at Newhouse School are these (e.g., may yield good discussion of technological, regulatory or other background about a media platform of interest):
And if you seek more in-depth discussion of a media platform from the literature of computer science (beware, because some of these sources may be a bit technologically intense for COM 100/107) - you could explore a search for the name of that platform using this database (perhaps looking to a recent article source that does not appear too saturated in high level computer science specialization):
Lastly, keeping in mind you are not at Whitman School creating an in-depth business plan - some COM 107 students when exploring broader background tied to regulation and technology of their named platforms, might find promising results when pulling up in-depth industry reports from industry databases like these appearing below (note, with some exceptions - multiple reports on specific types of media platforms seem a bit more common in IBIS - whereas Marketline offers recent industry profiles of the United States media industry as whole - and for other countries as well as global reports; Marketline also does contain some recent industry profiles of both the newspaper industry and also publishing industry, for the U.S., a wide variety of other countries and for the globe as a whole):
If seeking further explanation or examples for the typical formatting common to annotated bibliographies, see these guides:
If struggling with decision-making as to formatting of an annotated bibliography, one that has evaluative elements, do not forget that SU students also have access to the SU Writing Center and its consultants
If you see this icon next to the record for an article in one of the databases, click on it to see if the full-text is available online through the SU Libraries
For more information about video visit SU Libraries - video, film, and music collections website. These three very large streaming video databases are not directly compatible with SUMMON, but you are welcome to search them individually.
To identify whether SU Libraries has a specific newspaper, journal or magazine title in its print or online collection, you can: