New Alternative Press Resource

It's my pleasure to introduce a new open access database on the block, Independent Voices, a collection of alternative press materials from three pretty important decades of the last century--the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The database is the product of a four-year project by Reveal Digital to digitize over 1 million pages from academic library special collections across the United States.  Source libraries at Northwestern University, Duke Univeristy, University of Wisconsin, University of Buffalo, Michigan State University, University of Texas, University of Kansas and others are contributors.

So far the database is comprised of feminist, GI underground, LGBT, and the (literary) little press.  Other categories to be added will be the African American, Native American, underground campus, anarchist and right-wing press. In addition to newspapers and magazines, the archive includes little magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and calendars.

Access to proprietary alternative press resources, namely Left Index and Alternative Press Index, is available through the Penn Libraries/ASC homepage.

Propaganda Poster Digital Collection at Washington State U

Washington State University Libraries has recently launched a new digital collection of propaganda posters distributed  between 1914 and 1945. 520 posters from private donations comprise The Propaganda Poster Digital Collection illustrating how various governments tried to influence public and private behavior around the two World Wars.  Besides the United States, posters from Europe, South America and Canada are represented. 

This digital images can be browsed by key words in the description such as are easy to browse by keywords from the description of the images--such as food, women, bonds, god (only one entry).

"Prior to the advent of broadcast radio and television, governments looked to other media to communicate information to their citizens. One of the most eye-catching formats is the propaganda poster, the use of which peaked during World War I and remained pervasive through World War II. The U.S. government alone produced an estimated 20,000,000 copies of more than 2,500 distinct posters during the first World War. Through these “weapons on the wall,” governments persuaded their citizens to participate in a variety of patriotic functions, from pur­chasing war bonds to conserving scarce resources. These posters also strengthened public support for the wars by providing “message control” about the government’s allies and enemies." --description of The Collection

Vogue Archive

On the heels of last month's Fashion Week we are happy to welcome a new addition to the Penn Library website,  The Vogue Archive. 

The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. More than 400,000 pages are included, constituting a treasure trove of the work from the greatest designers, photographers, stylists and illustrators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Vogue is a unique record of American and international popular culture that extends beyond fashion. The Vogue Archive is an essential primary source for the study of fashion, gender and modern social history – past, present and future.
 
The database will allow fashion design and photography students to find inspirational images, but will also cater for academic study. Fashion marketing students will be able to research the history of a brand identity by viewing every advertisement for a brand such as Revlon, Coty, Versace or Chanel between specified dates. Researchers in cultural studies and gender studies will be able to explore themes such as body image, gender roles and social tastes from the 1890s to the present.  --Proquest

What's really great is that as historical as the archive is, it will continually be current, that is, the latest issue will be added each month with no embargo period (thank you Conde Nast!). Users can search on all text, captions, and titles throughout the magazine, including advertisements and covers.

Introducing EUscreen

EUscreen, is an ambitious audiovisual, mostly television, archive project whose aim is to bring together in one digital space millions of items from libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe (20 countries). The selection policy is currently three-pronged.  Items are selected either to inform 14 historical topics, as part of a virtual exhibition on themes that content providers select themselves, or as part of exhibitions on comparative themes across the region. Topics are broad: Arts and culture, Being European, Disasters, Education, Environment and Nature, Health, History of  Euroropean Television, Lifestyle and Consumerism, National holidays, festivals..., Politics and Economics, Religion and Belief, Society and Social Issues, Special Collections, The Media, Transportation, Science and Technology, War and Conflict, and Work and Production.  Genres are: Advertisements, Drama/Fictions, Entertainment and Performing Arts, Factual, Interstitials and Trailers, News, and Sport. 15 languages are represented. These video, audio, image and text materials range from the early 1900s to the present day.

In early 2012 EUscreen will launch an eJournal dedicated to the history of European television.  The journal will live on the EUscreen site.  Besides the searchable database of materials, the site will showcase curated exhibitions from member archives.  

EUscreen is currently in beta but it is up and available.  Keep an eye on it in the coming year as it goes into full breakout mode.

Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive

The Internet Archive hosts a television archive of the events of September 11 called Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.

A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, the Archive includes over 3000 hours of international news coverage from 20 channels over a seven day period, 9/11 through 9/17, 2001. The intentional coverage includes broadcasts from Mexico City, London, Beijing, Baghdad, Paris, Ottawa, Tokyo, and Moscow.

You can also watch the presentations of 10 speakers at the recent Learning From Recorded Memory: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference that was held in August 24, 2011.

While the Vanderbilt News Archive has coverage of the major US networks during this time, the non-proprietary nature of this collection is invaluable to folks outside University communities. The inclusion of international coverage, though limited, is also a plus.

I guess I should have posted this last month closer to the anniversary, but archives are about timelessness as much as timeliness!

Middle East and Islamic Resources from CRL

The latest issue of the Center for Research Libraries' online publication, Focus on Global Resources, features Middle East and Islamic scholarly source material available from CRL. Articles showcase research using Turkish newspapers, recent efforts to document the "Arab Spring" revolution, and how new technologies, specifically Archive-It, a web-crawling utility, are being used to capture the Middle East web.

CRL is an international consortium of research libraries that jointly collects and preserves newspapers, journals, and other archive materials. A large percentage of their acquisitions are from outside the United States, with major emphasis on the developing world. Member institutions provide students, faculty, and other researchers access to the collection through Interlibrary Loan and electronic delivery.

Paley Center for Media database

This semester Penn Libraries is proud to be a test site for The Paley Center for Media's database of television and radio programming which they are in the process of making available to college libraries. The Paley Center's permanent media collection contains nearly 150,000 television and radio programs and advertisements, available both in New York and Los Angeles. It constitutes the largest single repository of American television programming in the world.

The online database offers synopses, along with production credits for the programs. For the first time, beginning with this trial, they are offering online access to 15,000+ digitized programs in their collection to selected universities. In addition to the digitized content, users will also have access to the metadata of the complete collection of over 150,000 programs.

The way it will work is like this. If you want to explore this resource at here at Annenberg you must access it at the work station in the Library right outside my office. You will first be asked to set up an account (simply provide your UPenn email address and give yourself a password). Once you do that you're in. You may also access the Paley database at Van Pelt.

Accessing the collection at Penn
By the terms of our contract with the Paley Center, the digital content will not be available for streaming directly to your computer. Instead, there will be specially designated PCs located at the following locations at the Van Pelt Library and the Annenberg Library.

I.Laptops (10)
10 laptops will circulate from Rosengarten Reserve Desk. Make sure you ask for a laptop configured with the Paley login.

II.Van Pelt Library Rooms (10)
A.Weigle Information Commons:
Room 124
Room 126
B.Class of 1955 Conference Room:
1 C55 CR
C.Ormandy Center:
1 Film Studies Classroom (Ormandy, Room 425)
5 Music & Media Rooms (Ormandy, Rooms 424.3-424.7)

III. Annenberg Library
Designated PC

Introducing the George Gerbner Archive

The Annenberg Library is pleased to announce the opening of the George Gerbner Archive to communications students and researchers at Penn and around the world. George Gerbner was the second dean of The Annenberg School for Communication from 1964-1989 and one of the pioneering founders of the field of Communication as a scholarly pursuit. As Joseph Turow, the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, writing for Americana in 2006 explains:

[George]Gerbner believed it was crucial to understand the social impact of these mass-produced daydreams [television fiction] because they likely influenced the hierarchy of values as they developed in our minds, particularly in the minds of young people. The key was not to dwell on the positive or negative aspects of individual television shows, movies or songs. Instead, Gerbner insisted, because popular culture is mass-produced, it should be analyzed as a system of industrially patterned, rather than idiosyncratic or artistic, messages. With the "message system" as a central concept, communication research should pursue three fundamental goals: explore the forces that shape the pattern of messages; examine the overall nature of those message patterns; and understand the social roles or functions that those patterns play in society.
-- Industrial Folklore George Gerbner's (Tele)Vision, Americana, Summer 2006

The George Gerbner Archive consists of personal correspondence, research and administrative materials, reports, publications, news clippings, photographs, and memorabilia related to George Gerbner (1916-2006) and his work as a world-renowned media scholar and dean of the Annenberg School. The collection is rich in material concerning the Cultural Indicators Project, Gerbner’s pioneering analysis of television violence and cultivation theory, and the Cultural Environment Movement, a media advocacy organization founded by Gerbner in 1991.

The collection was donated to the Annenberg School in 2006 by Gerbner’s sons, John and Thomas. The collection reflects Gerbner’s prodigious research agenda and leadership as a scholar, administrator, and activist over a period of four decades. The collection consists of the following series: Biography, Cultural Indicators Project, Cultural Environmental Movement, Publications, Correspondence, Instructional Materials, Clippings, Photographs, Unpublished Materials, and Secondary Publications.

Appointments can be made to view materials that are not available online by contacting the Annenberg Library.

C-SPAN Video Library

Last week C-SPAN announced the completion of its the C-SPAN Video Library, a freely available Internet resource featuring every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, totaling over 160,000 hours. The Archives records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource. Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text. The video collection can be searched through the online Video Library.

These archives cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations. Though C-Span was established in 1979, recordings from the early years are spotty. But according to a recent New York Times article, C-SPAN has about 10,000 hours of tapes from before 1987 and plans to reformat them for the Web are already in motion.

Needless to say, this is an awesome historical resource and on top of that, the site is advertisement free.

Introducing adViews!

Great news! Duke University's TV commercial collections spanning from the 1940s to the present, have gone online. From the website:

"The AdViews digital collection provides access to thousands of historic commercials created for clients or acquired by the D'Arcy Masius Benton and Bowles advertising agency or its predecessor during the 1950s - 1980s. All of the commercials held in the DMBB Archives will be digitized, allowing students and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television."

AdViews is a collaborative project between the Digital Collections Program and the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, as well as a number of other groups, at Duke University.

Ads can be searched by keywords, company name, product, and by date. There are also broader categories to browse such as "Health and Beauty," "Transportation and Travel," "Food and Beverage," among others.

Note: To view the ads one needs to open them in iTunes. That appears to be the only option.

American Black Journal

Detroit Public Television (DPTV) together with Michigan State University (MSU) have collaborated to catalog, preserve, and provide internet public access to the entire corpus of shows from the DPT television series, American Black Journal, that aired from 1968-2002.

Both DPTV and MSU shared in the two main goals of this project--digital preservation of the ABJ tapes and using the shows to create a significant, accessible multimedia archive of African-American history. The programs cover a broad spectrum of African American history:

1. Education and Families: Building Opportunity and Community
2. Leadership: Politics, Politicians, and Reform
3. Musical Roots: Jazz, Motown, Gospel, Hip Hop, & Techno
4. Literature and Language: The Richness and Diversity of Black Voices
5. Religion and Spiritual Life
6. Sports and Entertainment: Actors, Athletes and the Black Community
7. Africa and African-Americans
8. Urban Challenges: Development, Re-development, CommunityLife
9. Poverty, Progress, Rise of BlackBusinesses and Professionals
10. Motor City & Motown: Detroit in Regional and National Context

You can search the site by these themes as well as chronologically by decade; the programs themselves are a mere click or two away as you navigate this simple, handsomely designed site.

Editorial Cartoons on the Web

Here's a great little roundup of editorial cartoon resources on the web in a recent College & Research Library News. I always make a point to check their regular feature, Internet Resources, which appears in most every issue. It's an old fashioned annotated bibliography of web resources on a variety of topics. You can browse by topic or date. Editorial cartoons on the Web: Picturing politics, by Paul Cammarata, collects libraries and archives, museums, professional organizations and online exhibits of political cartoon resources for students, scholars and the general public.

Keeping Up with the Shorenstein Center

New 2009 papers from The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University are available, along with their archive of previous papers arranged by date or author going back to 1989.

Recent Papers:

Sandra Nyaira: Mugabe's Media War: How New Media Help Zimbabwean Journalists Tell Their Story
Rory O'Connor: Word of Mouse: Credibility, Journalism and Emerging Social Media
Eric Pooley: How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change

The Publications section of the site includes not only Papers for download but Reports and Case Studies. Transcripts and/or video can be found in the News and Events Section for the annual Theodore H. White Lecture. (Rep. John Lewis was the 2008 speaker.)

Most recent Case Study:

Scott, Esther. Crossing the Line: Don Imus and the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team. 2008.

Recent Reports:

Shorenstein Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Character and the Primaries of 2008. 2008
Shorenstein Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The Invisible Primary — Invisible No Longer. 2008
Donsbach, Wolfgang, and Fiedler, Tom. Journalism School Curriculum Enrichment. 2008

Presidential Communication resource

Interested in comparing rhetoric from the Oval Office over time or just need the transcript of the recent stimulus package press conference? If so, The American Presidency Project is the place to go. Established in 1999 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the archive contains 85,728 documents related to the study of the Presidency: executive orders, proclamations, State of the Union addresses, State of the Union messages (hmm...what's the difference?), press conferences, Inaugural addresses, Saturday radio addresses, addresses to Congress, fireside chats (FDR), addresses to the nation, veto messages, addresses to the United Nations, radio & TV correspondents dinners, addresses to foreign legislatures, party convention addresses, and college commencement addresses. There is also a data archive to make quantifiable comparisons relating to President-Congress relations, popularity with the electorate, public appearances, growth of the Executive Branch, election campaigns, and speech lengths in number of words for the State of the Union and Inaugural addresses. It's a rich and sleek "Prez Comm" resource right at your fingertips.

Latin American Newspapers in World News Archive

Historic electronic newspaper files continue to arrive at Penn! The latest such addition to the Penn Library website:

World News Archive (Latin American Newspapers preliminary release)

Latin American Newspapers represents the initial result of the partnership between the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and Readex, a division of NewsBank, to systematically create an extensive Web-based collection--World News Archive--of international newspapers. On completion, Latin American Newspapers will include approximately 35 fully searchable newspapers printed throughout this region in the 19th and 20th centuries. This preliminary release provides more than 60,000 pages of El Mercurio, an important Spanish-language paper published in Santiago, including 3,000 issues printed between 1914 and 1922.

About World News Archive: Working with Readex, a division of NewsBank, CRL and its partner institutions (including Penn) expect to add three new collections to the WNA over the next eighteen months. The three collections are: African Newspapers, Slavic & East European Newspapers, and South Asian Newspapers.

Along with the recently released Latin American Newspapers, these three new historical collections will make more newspapers from the world’s regions available to the CRL community electronically. Guided by charter participants and the WNA advisory committee, CRL will select the content of these new collections from the international newspapers long collected and preserved in paper and microform by CRL and participating member libraries.

January CommQuote

"Perpetual Art Machine (PAM) is an on-line video database begun in 2005 that provides community for artists, curators, scholars, and students....In addition to the Web site, PAM sponsors an interactive, traveling video installation that allows viewers to function as curators, choosing video programs by selecting various keywords...

Colette Copeland: How does PAM differ from other on-line media databases, such as Rhizome or Eyebeam?

Lee Wells: The biggest difference is probably funding. In operation for over ten years, both Rhizome and Eyebearm are bankrolled by institutions and key patrons... Most of our funds come out of pocket and a lot of free labor on the part of the founders and volunteer PAM artists at large. Although PAM engages multiple forms of new media, our primary focus is on the growing international video art community. Rhizome and Eyebeam broadly cover the entire spectrum of new media.

CC: ...what are some of the concerns that collectors have regarding archiving and preserving video long term?

LW: In my opinion, it's all about the digital archive files. It's just a matter of time before everyone is up to speed. The days of Gigi-beta and DVDs will come to pass as we rapidly move into the era of HD video on-demand relayed through high-speed, fiber-optic networks and secured in on-line (bank-like) storage databases. The problem is that most people who buy art still want an object to hold. At this point it still takes an enlightened and progressive collector to invsest in video and new media art."

--from "Predicate, Participate & Perpetuate: An Interview with Perpetual Art Machine" by Colette Copeland, afterimage, Volume 36, Number 3, pp. 18-19

New Public Policy Archive

PolicyArchive is a new, innovative public policy archive of global, non-partisan public policy research brought to us by the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Library and the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group that encourages civic engagement.

The archive "makes use Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations." (website)

PolicyArchive's goals are ambitious. While it now holds more than 12,000 policy documents from about 220 think tanks and research groups, archive’s developers say they hope to be at 20,000 documents by the end of 2008. They expect to become the largest online repository of public-policy research in the world.

Among the general topics listed is "Media, telecommunications, and information" which is further divided into: Broadcasting, Communication systems, Electronic data processing, transmission, and retrieval, Film and video, Information policy, Journalism and the news, Mass media , Radio, Telecommunications, and Telephone. There is also a general topic of "Culture and Religion," which includes: Arts and arts policy, Cultural heritage and preservation, Culture and civilization, Language and languages, Museums, memorials, and monuments, and Symbols, emblems, and awards, among others.

The archive documents are free and available to all; researchers are encouraged to upload their documents to the site.

Hunter collection of Chinese political communication available from RCL

Chinese pamphlets: Political communication and mass education in the early period of the People's Republic of China is an electronic archive of mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. It includes approximately 200 cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards, and magazines, heavily pictorial in content, on such topics as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform. Produced by both Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) and Communist regimes, these materials appear to be directed at the general youth and adult populations of China.

The items were collected and, in many instances, translated and annotated by Edward Hunter. An analyst of propaganda and mass education, Edward Hunter (1902 – 1978) was a journalist, writer, and outspoken critic of Communism. His most well known book was Brain-washing in Red China: the calculated destruction of men’s minds (1951).

This collection constitutes the “street literature” of the revolution: comic books, leaflets and other ephemera distributed to the population of the provincial cities and villages whereas the propaganda collections Western libraries tend to hold are made up of the higher-end, made-for-export propaganda.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges and independent research libraries. The consortium, of which Penn is a member, acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching. These resources are then made available to member institutions cooperatively, through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.

Paley Center for Media

The Museum of Television and Radio, formerly the Museum of Broadcasting has morphed once again. Since March of this year it is now the Paley Center for Media, named after late CBS founder William S. Paley. Dropping the "Museum" part of its name is telling. The Center, which has two sites--New York and Los Angeles--will still serve as a repository of television and radio programming but sees itself as foremost a place for industry leaders and the public to engage in dialogue about media and its role in society. The number of panels and interview sessions will double and new media executives and creators are being brought in, in addition to those from traditional media.

The Center is currently in the process of digitizing its international collection of more than 140,000 programs covering almost 100 years of television and radio history, including news, public affairs programs and documentaries, performing arts programs, children's programming, sports, comedy and variety shows, and commercial advertising. Programming from some seventy countries is represented in the collection. The collection is not comprehensive, of course. The site points out that it is a curated collection, i.e. "programs have been selected on the basis of artistic achievement, social impact, or historic significance." Both the New York and Los Angeles sites house the same archive which at this point does not have a corresponding online catalog which would be most helpful especially for folks in the middle of the country for whom a trip to either coast is required.

Harper's Magazine Digital Archive

The Harper's Magazine Digital Archive is now available on the Penn Library website.
Online access to Harper's Magazine, the oldest general interest monthly in America, goes back to its inception, 1850. Featuring essays, in depth reporting, as well as fiction, Harper's is known for its fine writing and independent perspectives on politics and culture. It has featured some of the most notable writers of the day, from Horatio Alger, Mark Twain and Theodore Drieser to John Updike, Tom Wolfe and T.C. Boyle. Interestingly, the iconic Harper's Index is rather "young" in terms of the magazine's lifespan; it began in 1984. A spoof of the Index, Harper's Index Index, honoring the magazine's 150 anniversary includes such perspicacious comparisons as:

Months after its inception that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 11
Months after the French Revolution that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 2,336