Blog Author

Sharon Black is the librarian at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennslvania where she helps students, faculty, and the wider community utilize research resources in communication. She evaluates and purchases materials as needed and serves as a liaison between the Annenberg School and the Penn Libraries. She oversees ASC's reserve reading service (which includes Blackboard support) and a 24-hour document delivery service to faculty and graduate students. Central to the Library’s current awareness initiative is CommPilings , the Annenberg Library blog launched in 2006. As needed, she offers bibliographic instruction in workshops and classes in addition to one-on-one appointments.

Before serving in her current role as Communication Librarian, Sharon directed two large resource building projects at the Annenberg School. As archivist for the Annenberg Television Script Archive she is the author of the Thesaurus of Subject Headings for Television: A Vocabulary for Indexing Script Collections (1990) as well as “Checking Out the Librarian: Depictions of Librarians and Libraries on Prime Time Television,” in Popular Culture and Libraries (1994). She went on to develop an index vocabulary for United States presidential campaign rhetoric, specifically for The Annenberg/Pew Archive of Presidential Campaign Discourse CD-Rom (2000) which includes speech transcripts of the 1952 to 1996 presidential campaigns. Sharon serves on the Electronic Resources in Communication committee of the American Library Association and is a member of several academic Communication organizations. She holds a B.A. in English from Gettysburg College and an M.L.S. from Drexel University. She is also a widely published poet having received two Pushcart nominations (2005, 2007).