Highlighting two reference books

Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap, edited by Katharine Sarikakis and Leslie Regan Shade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Table of Contents: Revisiting international communication / Katharine Sarikakis and Leslie Regan Shade -- Feminist issues and the global media system / Margaret Gallagher -- Public/private / Gillian Youngs -- Women, participation, and democracy in the information society / Ursula Huws -- The expediency of women / Alison Beale -- Gender-sensitive communication policies for women's development / Kiran Prasad -- The spectral politics of mobile communication technologies / Barbara Crow and Kim Sawchuk -- The global structures and cultures of pornography / Katharine Sarikakis and Zeenia Shaukut -- Mediations of domination / Yasmin Jiwani -- From religious fundamentalism to pornography? the female body as text in Arabic song videos / Salam Al-Mahadin -- Female faces in the millennium development goals / Nancy Van Leuven ... [et al.] -- Deadly synergies / Patricia A. Made -- Online news / Jayne Rodgers -- Convergences / Vincent Mosco, Catherine McKercher, and Andrew Stevens -- Women, information work, and the corporatization of development / Lisa McLaughlin -- Empire and sweatshop girlhoods / Leslie Regan Shade and Nikki Porter -- Feminist print cultures in the digital era / Simone Murray -- Communication and women in Eastern Europe / Valentina Marinescu -- Godzone? NZ's classification of explicit material in an era of global fundamentalism / Mary Griffiths -- Grounding gender evaluation methodology (GEM) for telecenters / Claire Buré. Available from ASC Reserve.

Research Methods in Information, by Alison Jane Pickard (Facet Publishing, 2007). This methods handbook claims to be the first of its kind to "focus entirely on research needs of the information and communications community." The publisher is overstating the later claim since handbooks on communication research are common but I like having a research methods book around that focuses on information studies, including internet research. Available in ASC reference.