Research Guides: Political Science: Special Collections & Data Entry

Special Collections Research Center

The SU Libraries Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) holds a variety of unique sources relevant to politics and public affairs.

Examples include original papers and other historical records and/or artifacts of:

Earl Browder (General Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, 1930-1994; President of the U.S. Communist Political Association, 1944-1946)
Erastus Corning II (Served as Albany, NY Mayor for 41 years - 1942-1983)
Ted Koppel Collection (approximately 6,600 episodes of the ABC public affairs TV program Nightline, (Mar 1980-Nov 2005), accessed at a viewing station, Special Collections, 6th floor - Bird Library
American Political Campaigns (200 years of ribbons, press clippings, buttons, photographs and other political campaign paraphernalia are represented, including many U.S. Presidential election campaigns)
Edwin Diamond Political Audiovisual Collection (film/video and sound recordings of numerous political campaign commercials, Republican and Democratic Party conventions, televised political debates, press conferences and more - 1960s to 1990s)

Visit the SCRC website - for a complete list of SCRC holdings in politics, government and public administration.

Special Collections

Yet another category of unique primary historical source material would be any number of original printed, news or news media sources maintained at Bird Library's 6th floor - Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Below is a link to the page from SCRC that describes collection strengths - which at times certainly intersect with historical primary sources tied to politics, public affairs and political history. Use of those sources will be restricted to review at the 6th floor of Bird Library. Might apply to some of you where primary source exploration gets a bit more historical. For example, SCRC collection include ABC News Video donated by SU alumnus, Ted Koppel, consisting of approximately 6,600 episodes of Nightline (Mar 1980-Nov 2005).

SCRC Open Hours
PSC 495 students need not make formal "appointments" to visit SCRC. However, literal review of specific content does require pulling that for your review, which may take 24 hours or longer. It is important to have some general idea of the content you would like to explore prior to visiting SCRC
SCRC Collection Areas Website
Great portal to major areas of collections strength at the Special Collections Research Center
SCRC "Search the Collections" Website
Search tip: If you would like to see extensive lists of various categories for all of the many SCRC collections, leaving the query window blank and clicking "search" will retrieve 100% of the various "finding aid" pages at the left margin

Data Training - Research Data Tutorials

Provided by the Numeric Data Librarian, Paul Bern.

When working with significant sets of numeric data, these concise training modules cover:

Planning Your Research (Project documentation, etc.)
Working with Variables (...and supplementary training materials about statistical software packages SAS, STATA and SPSS)
Documenting Your Research (...and considerations about metadata)
Collecting Your Data (...and strategies for paper-based and electronic data collection, data entry and using secondary data)
Cleaning Your Data (...in preparation for data analysis, fixing problems, etc.)
Analyzing Your Data (..and steps tied to creating new variables, describing your data and, of course, doing the analysis)