Reading the Times

Need help with your research? Contact:

Kelly Cannon
Outreach and Scholarly Communication Librarian
Humanities & Business Subject Specialist
phone: x3602
email: kcannon@muhlenberg.edu
IM (AIM, Yahoo, MSN): refcannon
Reference desk IM: talktotrexler

Reference works (on level A of Trexler Library)

New York Times manual of style and usage (Ref Collection 808.02 S571n)
Encycl. of intl. media and communications (Ref Collection 302.2303 E56o) ***RECOMMENDED*** Sample
History of the mass media in the United States : an encyclopedia (Ref Collection 302.230973 B639h)
A dictionary of communication and media studies (Ref Collection 302.2 W339d, 1997)

Books

Trexler Library Catalog
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > catalog.
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College. Here are some titles to watch for, all results of a subject search on "New York Times":

Behind The Times : Inside The New New York Times (Main Coll. 071.471 D537b)
Foreign policy and the press : an analysis of the New York times' coverage of U.S. foreign policy (Main Coll. 070.449 B534f)
The Paper's papers : a reporter's journey through the archives of The New York Times (Main Coll. 071.471 S547p)
The times of my life and my life with the Times/Max Frankel (Main Coll. 070.92 F823t)

Or try a keyWORD search on "press coverage" or on "mass media" and then combine with a topic area like "terrorism" or "politics" etc..

WorldCat ***RECOMMENDED***
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Database > Most Popular > WorldCat
Catalog of books and documents in libraries throughout the world. Watch especially for the AREA LIBRARIES designation.

Online books

Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/)

Periodical articles

popular press. . .

New York Times.com
(http://www.nytimes.com/)
Online index to the NYT and other popular periodicals from 1850s to present. NOTE: The NYT is available full text on microfilm from 1851 to the present in the microforms reading area, level A, Trexler Library. A print index to the NYT on microfilm is also available, in the reference room on level A.

LexisNexis Academic
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Full text of newspapers from around the world, local as well as national. Coverage back to about 1980. Includes New York Times.

Academic Search Premier
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Good starting place for full text of popular magazines. Back issues as early as 1960s or prior.

Alternative Press Index
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
Articles from "underground" and other fringe periodicals.

academic and specialized. . .

Academic Search Premier
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Limit to "peer reviewed" to acquire scholarly journals. Covers all disciplines.

Communication and Mass Media Complete
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Standard index for media and communication studies.

MLA
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Standard index for literary studies, with some attention to analysis of news media.

HealthSource
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Focus on academic journals publishing in the area of medicine and health.

getting to the full text. . .

Once you have found the citation of a journal article you're interested in, click on the Get It link found next to the citation, or run a journal title search in Trexler Library's online catalog. ACCESS: Trexler Library website > catalog.

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan.
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > ILL

Search engines

Popular

Google (http://www.google.com)
Non-selective. One of the largest web crawlers.

Scholarly (use with discretion)

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)
An open-access web crawler that looks for content it identifies as "scholarly." Emphasis is on books and journal articles. Intended as a "federated search" to search across disciplines (weighted toward sciences and social sciences). Not always full text. Check our Journal Locator (see above) to see if Muhlenberg has access to the full text.

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/)
The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources.

Librarian's Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/)
Highly selective search engine and directory of web resources. Both scholarly and popular sites deemed important by a team of California-based public librarians. Entries are accompanied by paragraph-length descriptions.

Citing sources in an annotated bibliography

For tips on citing print and electronic sources, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources. ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Citation Guides.

For help in writing annotated bibliographies in the MLA style, visit Purdue's Online Writing Lab (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/) for a definition of an annotation and proper format.