New Annenberg Library Website

Look what March has blown in: a new look to the Annenberg Library website. On it you'll find the regular Penn Library necessities (including the most important FindIt box at the top), plus a lot of features targeted specifically for students and researchers in Communication.

The page is divided into three columns. On the left hand column under Annenberg Library you'll find our hours for the current day as well as links for contacting the library staff for reference or course reserve assistance; also document delivery (so now you don't have to remember the address). A link to the School's database of ASC theses and dissertations is also here.

Items for other Library services across campus can also be found lower down in this column (Interlibrary Loan and Borrow Direct services, Refworks, etc.)

The center column is the main research area of the page, leading off with pertinent catalogs (Franklin, LOLA, VCat, etc.) and then major Communication databases. This is not an exhaustive list of databases, just a bunch of the more regularly consulted ones. Note the first item: "Communication Abstracts, and others." By "others" I mean all those databases in a special family of databases that you can search at once when you go into one of them, in this case, Communication Abstracts. This family includes Sociological Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Francis, PsychInfo, ERIC, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, and others. To save space on the page I did not list any of these separately, counting on your understanding that Communication Abstracts is your gateway to them.

Take a look at the listing of News Sources, there are more, but this list really gets you started. Many students think only Lexis/Nexis for news when there are lots of other options. Penn's digital collection of historical newspapers is growing deeper everyday; if you haven't kept up with it you'll be surprised. Take a look at the Historical Newspapers Online Guide which you'll find in the News Sources section.

The right hand side of the page includes recent CommPilings postings. Below the blog box is a special e-journal section that randomly highlights a journal in the field.

I hope you'll want to bookmark this page over the general Library homepage which is less customized to Annenberg needs. Click around and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. There's an email link on the page to do just that. See if you can find it.