That Expensive Database We're Mad About

Tom Emmert has students in two of his courses looking at the New York Times and the Readers Guide (maybe the same assignment Amy blogged about?) but he apparently insisted in class they had to use microfilm. I am not sure he knows about the Historical database so I e-mailed him to tell him it was just as good and really expensive so they'd better use it!

Find my historical event in magazines and newspapers

Find my historical event - this is the one where they use the Readers' Guide to find articles about their historical event in contemporary magazines and newspapers. I pointed a student today (her event was from 1919) to the New York Times historical online and to the Readers' Guide and said she could also browse the microfilm of the other papers we have going back that far, since there are not indexes to them that are that old. I also told her about the key in the front cover to the abbreviations used in the Readers' Guide.

Another student asked me if the checkmarks by the titles in the front of each volume meant that our library had the title. I said that made sense, but, if that was the case, then that was probably done a long time ago and might not be 100% accurate for our collection now.

I should have also mentioned our primary sources page, specifically American Memory, as another place to find information, but...I didn't think of it until now.

Please post comments if there are other places I should tell students to look!

Media assignment

Another interesting challenge today was for a Media and Society assignment. The student needed to find out who produced a media artifact (she chose a Dixie Chicks album) and track down who was the ultimate parent company. She also needed company info and some idea of how profits are shared in the industry.

We used a handy-dandy site called Who Owns What to figure out who owned the company (in her case it was SONY BMG, which is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann). We looked up those two parents in LexisNexis and found Hoover reports (they're predicting a divorce, by the way). I also showed her Business Source Premier and Proquest Newsstand (which has the Wall Street Journal, unlike L/N.) Oddly enough, Communication and Mass Media Complete was less useful than I expected.

I don't know how many are in that class, but there may be more questions about this. It's a short paper, but they need to cite at least ten sources.

Leitch Alert!

I helped a student today who was looking for the Foreign Relations of the United States. These are shelved upstairs under JX233 .A3 from 1861 or so to the end of the 1970s. Look for a lot of maroon books.

The 1980s volumes are on that new-fangled technology, microfiche. They're on the main level and kept in the small microfiche cabinet at the end of the microfilm drawers closest to the not-so-aptly named "Value Center" where students feed money onto their cards. Some older volumes of this set are online, but not the fiche-y Reagan years, alas. If you scan to your right there is also, a few ranges down, a series from the State Department that looked useful. The title escapes me, but it's blue.

She also was happy to find the volumes of Presidential Papers (upstairs at J80 .A283 and, for two Bushes and Clinton, online).

We may get a few more of these!