E-Journals: New Issues This Week

New issues of the following journals are available online this week:

• Discourse Studies
  
• Journal of Macromarketing
  
• Journal of Media Economics
  
• Public Relations Review
  
• Science Communication

Click on a title to access the issue. (Login with your BC username and password is required for off-campus access.)

The Origins of Spring Break

You can find Web sites claiming Spring Break started with the ancient Greeks, but that probably tells us more about the variable quality of information on the Web than it does about Spring Break. For the real story of the origins of this collegiate rite of spring, as revealed through resources at BC, see this story from last Spring's ugrads@bc.library newsletter. And look for a new edition of the newsletter when you get back from this year's break.

Trial Database: Blackwell Reference Online

(From Books & Bytes in Major Mail)
On trial through April 7th, Blackwell Reference Online provides electronic access to nearly 300 scholarly reference works.

Titles in communication studies include A Companion to Media Studies and A Companion to Television, but the value to communication scholars doesn't stop there.  Other sources in Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, and other areas will also be valuable.

Search the full database, for example, for "interpersonal communication and gender" and you'll retrieve more than 40 articles from such sources as The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management,  The Handbook of Language and Gender,  The Handbook of Discourse Analysis,  A Companion to Media Studies,  The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, and others.

To browse or search the database, go to the Electronic Resource Trials page at http://www.bc.edu/libraries/meta-elements/res/trials.html and follow the instructions on the screen.  Let me know what you think.  Postive comments from faculty and students will help build support for adding this database to our list of resources.

Will TV Remain the Dominant Mass Medium?

Will the Internet kill television? Are scripted TV shows obsolete? Will television remain a viable medium for advertisers?

These are some the questions asked and closely examined in "Television's Future," a new report from CQ Researcher, available online via the BC Libraries.

In typical CQ fashion, the report offers historical background, a look at the current situation, statistics and survey data. It also explores the outlook moving forward amid a shifting landscape of technology and policy changes, new consumer expectations, and other developments.

Here are some excerpts:

Television is changing rapidly, and so is the TV audience. Viewers are ignoring broadcast schedules and watching programs via Internet “streams” and iPod downloads. Or they are “time-shifting” and skipping the commercials, using digital video recorders, such as TiVo, or video-on-demand television.
....

For all the ferment, however, Americans are watching more television than ever, using the new devices not to avoid traditional TV but to catch up on shows they otherwise would have missed. There's an atmosphere of experimentation and uncertainty in the industry reminiscent of the dot-com boom, but television and advertising executives insist that the future of TV is bright.
....

[T]echnology appears to be putting everything about the nature of television up for grabs. A medium that has long been primarily underwritten by advertising is watching its audience crack and break into a million pieces. Viewers accustomed to flipping through channels now are finding that their primary loyalty may be to specific programs, which in turn may be delivered to them through any number of different media.
....

One of the major questions facing the television industry today is whether its traditional means of delivery — networks of affiliated stations — can survive the changes.
....

There is endless experimentation, rapid technological change, a host of start-ups and a scramble among established companies to form new partnerships and adapt to a rapidly shifting landscape.

....

Despite the way today's young people flock to the latest gadgets and features, including Facebook and MySpace, their primary loyalty is to television. The average young person watches nearly four hours of TV a day — compared to 49 minutes playing video games — and is more likely to give television his or her undivided attention rather than any other media device...

Get to Know RefWorks

(From Books & Bytes in Major Mail)
30-minutes sessions on making the most of RefWorks, a Web-based tool for managing bibliographic citations, are being offered by library staff at different times over the next several weeks. Learn how to create and organize citations from journals, books, magazines, Web sites, and other sources and to automatically generate bibliographies in APA, MLA, and other formats.

These hands-on sessions will take place in O'Neill 105 on the dates and times listed below. Stop in for a session at a time convenient to you, or let me know that you're interested and I'll arrange special sessions just for Communication majors.

Wednesday, February 21, 11 a.m.
Tuesday, February 27, 4 p.m.
Wednesday, February 28, 11 a.m.
Saturday March 3, 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday March 14, 12:00 p.m
Tuesday March 20, 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday March 21, 12:00 p.m.
Tuesday March 27, 2:00 p.m.

Oprah Transcripts: Gone Before You Knew They Were There?

Transcripts of the Oprah Winfrey show, one of the hidden gems in LexisNexis and Factiva, are no longer being updated in those databases. Older shows, from October 2001 to December 2006, are still available, but nothing new has been added since the beginning of this year.

A note in Factiva says that the provider of these transcripts, Burrelle Information Services, is no longer transcribing the show. That's not quite correct: the Burrelle's Web site offers them for sale through a site called Oprah's Boutique. But new ones are not being made available to LexisNexis or Factiva.

I'll let you if I learn more. In the meantime, contact me if you want to know how to find the older transcripts, useful in many ways for communication research, in the two databases.

Presidential Campaigning 2.0

Which presidential candidate has the most MySpace friends? Which ones post videos of their speeches on YouTube? Who recently had an (unofficial) Second Life campaign site established?

TechPresident is a new site from the Personal Democracy Forum that looks at "how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign."

It's an interesting look at how Web 2.0 changes in communication and technology are playing out on the campaign trail.

The Future of News

What is the future of news?

PBS' Frontline tries to answer that question in News War, a four-part series beginning tonight and a companion News War Web site.

The site will include online viewing of the full series (Parts I & II are now available) as well as transcripts of interviews with 50 major players in the debates over the role of media in U.S. society.

Mass Comm Theory & The Wizards of Buzz

The Wall Street Journal this week wrote about a "new generation of hidden influencers ... taking root online." They're key users of social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Newsvine, and others, and (says the Journal) they're "shaping what we read, watch and buy."

Is this the venerable two-step flow with a cyber twist? A new kind of agenda-setting? Or are other mass communication theories at play?

Read the journal article, "The Wizards of Buzz", and see what you think?

Creating a Personal List in the Library Catalog

(From Books & Bytes in Major Mail)
How do you keep track of lists of books and other items you find while searching in Quest, the BC Libraries Catalog? Print them out one at a time? Write down the information for each item on a piece of paper?

Here’s a better way:

The “My List” feature of Quest lets you create your own personal list of records you select. You can then print, save or e-mail the selected information for later use.There are two ways to add items to your list:

1. When looking at an individual record, simply click on the Add to My List button at the upper left of the screen; or
   
2. When you have a group of records on the screen after conducting a search, check the check boxes next to the items you want, and then hit the Add to My List button.

You can continue to add records through different searches as long as you are in Quest. When you’re done, click on the View My List button at the top of the screen, and you’ll be offered options to print the list, e-mail it to yourself (or someone else), or save it to your computer.

Super Bowl Ads: Great Online Analysis

The New York Times Web site has a terrific interactive look at Super Bowl ads from 1984 to 2007. Use the slider at the top of the screen to move through the years. For each year, it shows a count of the number of ads in different product categories (vehicles, beverages, travel, food, etc.) plus the percentage of ads each year that featured humor, animals, and celebrities. 2007 had the highest percentage of ads with humor (72%) of any year, though there's no analysis of the quality of the humor. Selected ads can be viewed on screen.

Communication and Culture in The Encyclopedia of American Studies

The Encyclopedia of American Studies, a new addition to BC's collection of electronic resources, includes an excellent collection of articles on topics related to Communication and Culture. Check it out for historical overviews on such subjects as Advertising, Celebrity, Hate Speech, Media and Politics, Political Cartoons, Public Relations, Reality Television, and more.

Communication Abstracts Update

The bi-monthly update of the Communication Abstracts database is now complete, with 340 new journals articles, book chapters, and books. Use the links below to view all of the new entries or to browse them by major topic area:

All New Abstracts

New Abstracts by Topic Area

1. Communication Processes
2. Interpersonal Communication and Relations
3. Economics and Communication
4. Communication, Culture, and Society
5. Education and Communication
6. Health Communication
7. Political Communication
8. Communication, Regulation, and the Law
9. Organizational Communication
10. Public Relations
11. Advertising, Marketing, and Consumer Behavior
12. Mass Media
13. Journalism and News Media
14. Communication and Information Technology
15. Telecommunications
16. Communication Theory and Research

Millions of News Photographs in Factiva

Did you know ...?

....that the Factiva database , best known for access to the Wall Street Journal and thousands of other newspapers and magazine articles from around the world, also includes an ever-expanding archive of more than two million news photos from Reuters and other sources as far back as the 1980s?

Here's how to search and find news photos in Factiva:

1. From the main Factiva page, click on the Search tab at the upper left.
2. Click on the Source button (in gray, next to the plus sign, in the center of the screen).
3. From the Source Category drop-down menu, select Pictures.
4. Click on Reuters Pictures. (Other sources are Fashion Wire Daily and McClatchy Tribune Photo Service)
5. Enter search terms and hit the Run Search button.

New pictures are added to Factiva every day. Note that the default search covers only the last three months, but there are many other date options from which you can choose.