Archive for February, 2018

Occupational Safety project

February 28th, 2018 by Jack

Here are the resources I cited in class yesterday:

Finding video and graphical archives

February 23rd, 2018 by Jack

Looking for video online?  Of course, there’s YouTube and the like, but what about professional databases with substantial broadcast archives?  The J-school has subscriptions to such databases, which also feature superior search functionality.

  • TVEyes (student login info here) allows you to search TV programming from many networks via closed captioning, which along with getting video can also serve as an alternative method of getting (rough) transcripts not available in databases like Nexis and Factiva.  (I’m also aware of the similar services Critical Mention, ShadowTV and Volicon, which we don’t have.)
  • Whereas the services above allow viewing of recent broadcasts, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a deeper archive of news broadcasts from major national sources–with streaming video available from CNN and NBC, and DVD ordering available from all sources.  Also, keep in mind that a broadcast operation will usually have its own internal archive.  At NBC, the searchable database is known as Media Central.
  • Although they don’t qualify as a professional subscription databases, the Internet Archive also has useful TV News, moving image and ephemeral film collections that you might explore.

Regarding graphical print archives, there are many more places to go.

  • We have access to PDF archives of the New York Times and Amsterdam News (via “Black Newspapers”) through the J-school’s subscription to ProQuest.  Dates of coverage vary.  In addition, the Brooklyn Public Library provides free access to PDF archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1841 to 1955 via Newspapers.com, which also has varying archives from more than 6,000 papers worldwide that you can access by visiting the Research Center and asking to use our subscription. Elsewhere on a national scale, the Library of Congress has a collection of newspapers from most states (including New York), ranging from 1789 to 1949.
  • You can get PDFs of current newspaper front pages around the world from the Newseum.  Archives are also available for selected dates.  Only front pages, though.
  • We have access to many magazine and journal PDF archives through the J-school’s subscriptions to BrowZine, EBSCO MasterFILE, Gale Academic OneFile and JSTOR, which are aggregator databases similar to Nexis and Factiva, but are not limited to text only.  Also, CUNY and the J-school maintain lists of where you can obtain articles by publication name, many of which are in PDF format.
  • You can get PDF archives of the Economist, JAMA, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine and Science via separate web sites courtesy of J-school subscriptions.  Again, varying dates of coverage.
  • UNZ.org has PDF archives of several magazines that are not under copyright.  You have to peruse the list of titles to see which are available.
  • Google Books has scanned archives of many magazines, popular and otherwise.  Billboard, Ebony, Jet, Life, New York, Spin and Vibe might be especially useful, but there are plenty more.  These aren’t completely up to date, but do have deep archives.  On screen images only, though.  No PDF downloads.  Similarly, Google News has scanned archives of many newspapers, including the Village Voice.  Same deal with the lack of downloads.

This is the warning NBC uses for the sites above:  THESE SITES ARE FOR REFERENCE ONLY.  You will be connecting to external sites and all images must be cleared for on-air use, regardless of source. If you have questions, please contact the Rights & Clearances Department.

Bonus tip: Looking for photos?  The New York City Department of Records Municipal Archives has an online photo gallery of over 900,000 images.