Uncategorised – Library Subject Support

Resources for Media Studies

The Library has lots of great collections and resources, so when it comes to finding wider reading for your topic or beginning research for your assignment or dissertation it might all seem a bit overwhelming. Library Search is a great place to start looking for information but there are many other resources you might want to try. To help you get the best out of our resources we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful online databases and collections for Media Studies.

Let’s dive in!

Scopus

Scopus is a large, interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature, providing an index of articles, book chapters, conference papers and trade publications.

One of the main advantages of using Scopus is that it provides a lot of useful information about the articles it indexes. This includes full reference lists for articles and cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. You can also set up citation alerts, so you can be informed of new, relevant material automatically.

Scopus tutorial showing how to expand your search results.

Scopus includes other smart tools that can help you track and visualise the research in your area, including author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results, a journal analyser, and author identifier tools. You’ll find tutorials and advice on using these features in the Scopus support centre and on their YouTube Channel.

JSTOR

JSTOR provides access to full-text materials including scholarly journals, books and book chapters in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It has basic and advanced search options that allow you to search by topic keyword, author, subject area, title or publisher.

Take a look at our Get more out of JSTOR blog post to find tips for advanced searching on this database.

Film and Television Literature Index

The Film and Television Literature Index is an excellent resource for film and television research, with coverage focused on film and television theory, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews. You’ll find indexes and abstracts for more than 500 journals and full-text records for over 100 journals and books.

The database uses subject terms to help you refine your search and get more helpful results, this (five minute) video explains how to use the database and how the subject term functions works.

Video guide to the Film and Television Literature Index.

Newspapers

Newspapers can be a great source of information, with news stories and editorial opinion offering a fascinating angle on your research topic. The Library provides access to a wide range of news resources, dating from the 17th century to the present day, and stretching from Newcastle to New York and beyond. You’ll find an overview of these resources and some helpful videos and links for getting started on our Newspaper Guide.

Remember to use your critical thinking skills when using newspapers as they may present biased opinion and inaccurate facts – watch out for Fake News!

Current News

If you’re looking for current news sources, Lexis is an excellent place to start. Providing access to UK national and regional newspapers, from the 1990s to the present day, Lexis presents a copy of the newspaper text, without images or formatting, alongside the details you’ll need to create a reference.

Once you have logged in to Lexis, click News in the main menu to go straight to the news content. You can refine your search using date ranges, keywords or by selecting specific newspapers or publication types (i.e. broadsheet or tabloid).

International News

The Library’s online news resources are strongest for the UK, but we do also provide access to a wide range of historic and contemporary international news resources, including The New York Times archive. You may want to explore Nexis which covers international news from the 1990s to present day.

Historic News

The Library provides access to several million digitised pages of historic newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century. We have all UK broadsheet archives online (e.g. The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph) as well as titles which are strong in arts and culture coverage, such as the Times Literary Supplement.

If you want to search across a range of historic new sources, start with Gale Primary Sources, as this gives access to almost all our British newspaper archives, except The Guardian and The Observer.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

Box of Broadcasts allows you to access TV and radio broadcasts from over 65 channels, including most of the UK’s Freeview network, all BBC TV and radio content from 2007, and several foreign language channels. It’s a great resource for finding documentaries or critical opinions.

You can view archived programmes, create clips and playlists, and see transcripts to help with citation and translation. You can also search other users’ public playlists to see curated lists around topics similar to your own. There are lots of helpful tutorial videos on the BoB website.

Unfortunately, Box of Broadcasts is not available outside the UK.

Statista

Statista is an extensive statistics platform covering over 1.5 million data sets. It includes reports, statistics and forecasts on a range of topics. So if you want to know which social media platforms are most popular across the globe; compare TV advertising statistics; explore industry trends, or see how many people use Netflix, Statista is a brilliant place to start.

Statistics and reports can be exported in a range of formats including images and PowerPoint, giving you flexibility over how you can include visual data in your assignments. The statistics’ source is also included, giving you the information that you need to cite it successfully.

Statista tutorial showing how to do a basic search for data.

You will find a similar sources on our Statistics and Market Research guides.

Media Subject Guide

This list was just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area, to access these and to find out more visit your Subject Guide and explore the journals, databases and subject specific resources we’ve curated for Media Studies students.

COVID 19 – Impact and Response; welcoming our new themed guide

As well as compiling Subject Guides for each School across campus, your friendly Library Liaison Team also put together Resource Guides on topics of interest and significance. While you might currently feel like you’ve read more than enough on the Covid-19 pandemic to last a lifetime; bear with us!

COVID-19: Impact and Response

“What does the future hold in the coming months and years? The pandemic has the potential to make its effects felt for years to come.”

More than ever, it’s been difficult to keep ahead of the pace of change and updates. Our team of library staff and student volunteers have been sorting the current affairs wheat from the chaff on behalf of our Library colleagues and users. Focusing on the impact and response to the crisis, both here in the UK and globally, the resource guide takes in a wide range of interdisciplinary fields, from sport to society, and transport to technology.

The guide also offers a Scopus feed of some of the most recent NU research outputs on corona virus and its implications.

We think this might be of particular interest to those of you who may be considering a topical COVID 19 angle for upcoming dissertations or assignments. If you’re aware of any updates or new resources that you think our readers should be aware of, we’ve incldued a contact box so you can send us your suggestions.

Resource in focus: Perdita Manuscripts

The Perdita Manuscripts is an excellent resource for those interested in Early Modern history, Women’s Studies, and the History of the Book. It provides access to digital copies of little known manuscripts written by women, together with helpful notes and essays by experts in the field.

The database holds over 230 digitised manuscripts created and compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These previously ‘lost’ (perdita) female authors produced a diverse range of content such as account books, calligraphic writing, culinary writing, diaries, medical writing, prayers, prose, translations, travel writing, verse and more. The collection also includes writing in English, French, Greek, Italian, Latin and Spanish.

Screenshot of a Perdita Manuscript scanned document

Document detail pages include a scan of the original document, which you can enlarge to read or download as a pdf, alongside bibliographic details of the manuscript. Links below provide further details, sometimes including physical descriptions of the manuscript, additional information on the repository holding the item, notes and searchable keywords.

Some manuscripts also include section details for each page of the scanned document, which have details such as genre of a section, first and last lines and folio information.

Screenshot showing the section detail tab and search results tab in Perdita Manuscripts.

Where you have accessed the document via a search query, you’ll also find a Search Results tab, which provides an overview of where your search terms can be found in the document.

The manuscripts can be explored and accessed in three ways:

Browse Documents Section

Under the Browse Documents tab, you can browse the manuscripts by alphabetical listing, genre, repository, date, language or by particular primary authors (Perdita Women).

Search Directories

The Search Directories, available under the Research Tools tab, allow for browsing using subject terms lists (metadata). You can select from a list of Perdita Women (primary authors of manuscripts), Names in general (key names included in the database, excluding the Perdita Women), Places, and Genre.

Screenshot showing the terms lists within the Search Directory of Perdita Manuscripts.

In the Research Tools tab you’ll also find an index of the first lines of both poetry and prose texts.

Search Tool

The search tool located in the top right, provides options for a basic keyword search and an advanced search. While BOOLEAN operators, phrase searching, and wildcards can be applied in both search options, advanced search allows for a more complex query to be constructed by searching particular fields (e.g. title), limiting by date, and selecting specific terms from lists of Perdita women, languages, genres or sources.

The Help section provides further useful advice and guidance on searching the database and using the digitised images in your study, research or teaching.

Library Search: top search tips

Library Search is a powerful tool that can help you find good quality, relevant information quickly. Using Library Search is pretty intuitive but there are some useful search tips that can help you improve and get the most out of your searches:

Keywords and Subject Terms

When you’re searching for information it’s important to use a range of related keywords to ensure you find everything relevant to your topic. For example, if you’re searching for information on ‘Climate Change’ you might also want to search for ‘Greenhouse Effect’ or ‘Global Warming’ too. Thinking of related keywords can sometimes be difficult but Library Search can help!

From your search results page, click on the title of a resource to open the resource record and scroll down to the ‘Details’ section. Here you will find a list of ‘Subjects’, also known as subject terms, used to describe the topics and themes this particular resource discusses. Take a look at this list and add any relevant words to your search string.

Screen shot of Library Search subject terms for climate change

There are some other useful features in the resource record page that can help with your searches too:

Browse the virtual shelf

At the very bottom of the record you’ll find a virtual bookshelf, a visual list of the books that can be found next to this one if you were looking in the physical library. As the library is organised by subject some of these titles might be useful for your research too.

Screen shot of virtual shelf on library search

Read the abstract

A quick way to tell if a resource is going to be relevant and useful for your research is to read the abstract, a summary of the contents of the resource. On the resource record in Library Search, you’ll find this under the heading ‘Description’.

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search function in Library search allows you to create a search that will produce more focused results. It does this by providing a range of search fields and drop down lists that help you build up your search.

Screen shot of advanced search

Select from the options to:

Limit your search field to the title, author, subject, collection etc.
Apply BOOLEAN operators (AND, OR, NOT) to your keywords
Filter by specific material types, languages and dates to focus your search results to the most relevant resources.

Take a look at the Advanced Searching page on our Finding Information Guide for more on how to combine your keywords, create a search string and improve your search results.

Exam revision: tips and support

A wooden desk with a Mac laptop, cup of black coffee, notepad and pen and mobile phone. — Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

This time of year is normally one of the busiest for the Libraries on campus. Instead, the Libraries are currently physically closed and both revision and exams are taking place at homes across the country (and possibly further afield!). While this ‘new normal’ might seem overwhelming at first, in many ways, it’s business as usual. Read on to find out how we can all work together to ensure you have the best possible revision and exam experience.

How the Library can help

First and foremost, Library services haven’t stopped while the University is closed, they’re simply operating differently right now. You’re still able to organize an online one-to-one appointment with your Liaison librarian or request that the Library purchase an e-book to assist your studies.

Your subject-specific guide also contains links to useful journals, databases and eBook collections that are tailored for your course. You may also find it helpful to browse through a list of newly-acquired online resources that the Library have purchased to better enable your studies from home.

There are a number of MCQ (multiple choice question) books available to read online to complement your revision. They cover subjects including: paediatrics, neurology and physiology.

You may also like to look into the services offered by the Writing Development Centre (WDC). Their website has helpful guidance on preparing for exams and what do to during an exam. You can also arrange a one-to-one consultation with a WDC tutor via Zoom to discuss exam and revision strategies.

Library Help remains available 24/7 to assist with your queries – please send them in via email or live chat. We are also regularly updating Library FAQs to bring you the most up-to-date information. (Hint: if you filter the FAQs to show ‘remote services temporary FAQ’, you’ll only be shown the newest Library FAQs.)

How the University can help

The Academic Skills Kit (ASK) is full of useful advice, covering all aspects of study from how to manage your time effectively to reading and note-taking. ASK also has useful guidance on exams and revision, including where to go for academic advice or personal support.

Following the announcement of lockdown, ASK have made some new resources to assist with online examinations. These are broken down into helpful categories: how to revise for an online exam, what to do before an online exam and exam technique. While you will get details from your School about the specific changes to your exam(s), these pages have really helpful advice on preparing for and succeeding in online assessment.

Before taking an online examination, you may want to look at Newcastle University IT Service’s (NUIT) remote working toolkit. This website contains loads of helpful information, including how to access your University email and documents away from home, as well as how to download a copy of Microsoft Office 365 Professional Plus for your home device.

How you can help

Choose an area in your home to work in that’s best suited to your needs. This might be a bedroom, kitchen or office space. You may want to consider making some adjustments to your existing desk (or kitchen table!) to avoid causing an injury. If possible, choose to work in an area that has plenty of natural light and is well-ventilated.

Build yourself a realistic revision planner, with plenty of breaks factored in. You won’t be able to revise everything in one day so breaking down topics into manageable chunks is essential. Regular exercise, a balanced diet and a good night’s sleep are also key to revision success.

Remember to take regular study breaks to stay hydrated, get fresh air and clear your mind. You’re unlikely to revise effectively without regular breaks and time away from your work. There are a number of activities and resources on the Library’s website for things you can do while taking a break. These include seated desk yoga, colouring in sheets and mindfulness exercises.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, please contact the University Student Health and Wellbeing services or the Student Union’s Mental Health & Wellbeing site. These services are still available despite the University being physically closed.

From all of us in the Library, good luck and study well!

Resource on trial: Westlaw student textbooks

We are pleased to announce we have trial access to Westlaw’s student textbooks, in addition to the standard Westlaw All Books collection we use on a daily basis.

The Sweet & Maxwell Academic collection gives access to an additional 19 titles to support studying at home during this pandemic. Titles include Winfield & Jolowicz on Tort, Treitel on the Law of Contract, Megarry & Wade on the Law of Real Property and Elliott & Wood’s Cases and Materials on Criminal Law, among others.

To access this content, log into Westlaw and click on Books in the menu at the top of the page.

An image of the Westlaw home screen with the Books option highlighted.

If you know the book you are looking for, search by a title keyword, e.g. tort.

An image of the Westlaw Books screen with Search highlighted.

If you want to browse these student-focused books, use the filters on the left-hand side of the screen. Scroll down and select ‘Sweet & Maxwell Academic’.

We hope you find this additional access to Westlaw useful; please leave feedback or contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk you want to get in touch. The temporary access ends on May 27th 2020.

Books added to the Library by students in SAPL (Semester One 2019/20)

We have a service called “Books on Time” for students. This allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.

Further information about Books on Time

In Semester One, academic year 2019/2020 we bought the following items after requests from students in SAPL.

There were 132 requests from 55 students totalling £4859.98 (33% from Undergraduate, 23% from Postgraduate taught and 25% from Postgraduate Research)

Title	Now in stock
R 128 by Werner Sobek: Bauen im 21. Jahrhundert, architecture in the 21st century	1xlong
A History of Future Cities	1xlong
A History of Metallography	1xlong
Al Manakh 2: Export Gulf (vol 23)	1xlong
Al Manakh: Dubai Guide, Gulf Survey (vol 12)	1xlong
An Architectural Model	1xlong
An Atlas of Geographical Wonders	1xlong
Angels and wild things : the archetypal poetics of Maurice Sendak	1xlong
Architectural Model Building	1xlong
Architectural Tiles: Conservation and Restoration	1xlong
Architecture Interruptus	2xlong
Architetti-pittori e pittori-architetti	1xlong
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet	1xlong
Autogeddon	1xlong
Automatic for the City Designing for People in the Age of the Driverless Car	1xlong, 1xebook
Between Dystopia and Utopia	1xlong
Biomimetics for Architecture: Learning from Nature	1xlong
Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women	1xlong
Caldecott & Co. notes on books & pictures	1xlong
Calton Hill: And the plans for Edinburgh’s Third New Town	1xlong
Carlo Scarpa: the complete works	2xlong
Cartographies of the absolute	1xlong
Cities, Words and Images	1xlong
Constant: New Babylon	1xlong
Cosmos of Light: the sacred architecture of Le Corbusier	1xlong
Country	1xlong
Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950	1xebook
Cultural Identity and Urban Change in Southeast Asia: Interpretative Essays	1xlong
Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change	1xlong
Design Process in Architecture: From Concept to Completion	1xlong
Designing research for publication	1xlong
Drawing support: murals in the North of Ireland	1xlong
Drone: Object Lessons	1xlong
Dubai, the City as Corporation	29/11/2019
Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle	1xlong, 1xebook
Edinburgh	1xlong
Edinburgh: Mapping the City	1xlong
Experimental Architecture: Designing the Unknown	2xlong
Facing Gaia	3xlong
Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation)	1xlong
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming	1xlong
From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History	1xlong
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want	1xlong
Greening modernism: preservation, sustainability, and the modern movement	1xlong
Gross ideas: tales of tomorrow’s architecture	1xlong
Hanoi: City of the Rising Dragon	1xlong
Health and Comfort in House Building	1xlong
Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery	1xlong
Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine – Signed Special Edition	1xlong
Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide	1xlong
How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble A practical guide	1xlong
Hungry City: how good shapes our lives	2xlong
Hungry Planet	1xlong
Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment	1xlong
Illegal Architect	1xlong
Imagined Futures Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics	1xlong
Industrial heritage re-tooled: the TICCIH guide	1xlong
Inside Picture Books	1xlong
interact or die	1xlong
Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City	1xlong
Lace not Lace: Contemporary Fiber Art from Lacemaking Techniques	1xlong
Landscape, Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Citizenship	1xlong
Leeds: Shaping the City	1xlong
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital	1xlong
Living with Buildings: And Walking with Ghosts	1xlong
Lo-TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism	1xlong
Lucy Skaer	1xlong
Marginality and exclusion in Egypt	1xlong
Material Imagination in Architecture	1xebook
Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England	1xlong
Meat Market: Female flesh under Capitalism	1xlong
Migrant City (Routledge Advances in Ethnography)	1xlong
Model Making: Conceive, Create and Convince	1xlong
Moravia Manifesto	1xlong
New Frontiers of Architecture: Dubai Between Vision and Reality	1xlong
Non-places	14xlong
Notes on the Ventilation and Warming of Houses, Churches, Schools, and Other Buildings	1xlong
O&O Baukunst: View of the interior	1xlong
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Re-enactment: On Performing Remains	1xlong
Pleasure: the architecture and design of Rockwell group	1xlong
Plunder of the commons	1xlong
Preserving the world’s great cities	1xlong
Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies	1xebook
Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience	1xlong
Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis	1xlong
Resilience and Ageing Creativity, Culture and Community	1xlong
Retail Apocalypse: The Death of Malls, Retailers & Jobs	1xlong
Retail Therapy: Why the Retail Industry is Broken – and What Can be Done to Fix It	1xlong
Rossville Flats: The Rise and Fall	1xlong
sand To Silicon: Achieving Rapid Growth Lessons from Dubai	1xlong
Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life	1xlong
Sport, leisure and culture in the postmodern city	1xlong
Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia (Planning, History and Environment Series)	1xlong
The architectural tourist: architectural impressions of Europe	1xlong
The Architectural Tourist: Part 2 (RIAS)	1xlong
The Architecture School Survival Guide	1xlong
The Art of Maurice Sendak	1xlong
The Biophilia Hypothesis	1xebook
The Building Regulations: Explained and Illustrated	1xlong
The Case for Subtle Ar(t)chitecture	1xlong
The Chief Secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland	1xlong
The Fungi / 3rd edition	1xebook
The Future of Fashion: Understanding Sustainability in the Fashion Industry	1xlong
The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors	1xlong
The Mental and the Material	1xlong
The Narrator’s Voice: Dilemma of Children’s Fiction	1xlong
The New Town of Edinburgh: An Architectural Celebration	1xlong
The Picturesque	1xlong
The politics of design in French colonial urbanism	1xlong
The Right to the Smart City	1xlong, 1xebook
The Routledge Companion to Picture-books	1xlong
The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border Book	1xlong
The secret block for a secret person in Ireland	1xlong
The Smart City in a Digital World	1xebook
The Tenement Handbook: A Practical Guide	1xlong
The Town Below the Ground: Edinburgh’s Legendary City	1xlong
The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late 20th Century City	1xlong
Timespace and International Migration	1xlong
Tokyo	1xlong
Traducción y traductología introducción a la traductología	1xlong
Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective	1xlong
UAE and the Gulf: Architecture and Urbanism Now	1xlong
Vancouverism	1xlong
Vexed Texts: How Children’s Picture Books Promote Illiteracy	1xlong
Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion	1xlong
Ways of the Illustrator	1xlong
Whale and the Reactor	1xlong
Why are we the Good Guys?	1xlong
Why Fashion Matters	1xlong
Why look at plants?	1xlong
Why We Can’t Afford the Rich	1xlong
Would you kill the fat man? The trolley problem and what your answer	1xebook

Resource on trial: SAGE Video Collection

SAGE Video is an easily accessible resource with more than 1,600 hours of streaming video collections in the social sciences, created for use across higher education to support pedagogical needs, for undergraduate teaching and learning through to higher level academic research.

SAGE Video combines originally commissioned and produced material with licensed videos to provide a complete disciplinary resource for students, faculty, and researchers.

It covers the following subject areas:

Business & Management
Counseling & Psychotherapy
Criminology & Criminal Justice
Education
Leadership
Media, Communication & Cultural Studies
Politics & International Relations
Psychology
Sociology

The resource includes:

Seminal documentaries on subjects aligned to core curriculum topics
Case studies on classic and newly published research
Tutorials illustrating practical applications of methods and concepts
Interviews with leading experts on key topics
Practitioner demonstrations of theories and techniques
Observational footage of practitioners in real-life professional settings
Short definitions of key terms and concepts

To access this resource, click on the link here.

The trial is available until 16th March 2020. As always, your feedback will be very welcome: you can either email it, or leave a comment on this blogpost.

If you are off-campus, please login to RAS first of all, and then access SAGE Video from a browser within RAS.

Are you preparing a dissertation or project, or will be doing so next academic year?

Make sure you visit our interactive dissertation and project guide. Based on the extensive experience of staff from the Library and Writing Development Centre, this guide includes an interactive search planner, which takes you through the different stages of developing your search strategy, and enables you to create and download your personalised search plan: you can even ask for feedback on it from the Library liaison team.

The search planner is complemented by a project proposal planner, developed by our colleagues in the Writing Development Centre, to help you develop or refine your research proposal.

The guide also points you to further advice on a wide range of relevant skills, to give you advanced knowhow in finding, managing and evaluating information. For example: where to find specialised information resources for your subject area, and methods to keep your literature search up to date over a long period.

It’s easy to navigate, with clear text and short videos throughout. Whether you are already underway with your dissertation, or just starting to think about it, we’re sure you will find it helpful!

Referencing – getting the right ingredients

Referencing

Academic work builds upon the shared ideas, words and findings of other people. However, whenever you use other people’s work you must acknowledge it. This includes sources from books, journal articles, newspapers, video or other sources. You need to make it clear to the readers of your work where you got the information from and who produced it.

Find out more about how to reference and managing your references using our electronic guides.

Remember if you are directly quoting an author you need to put the text in quotation marks and give the page number, e.g. “Referencing is the best” ^{(1 p. 3)}

Referencing Styles

There are a number of different referencing styles which enable you to present your references in a particular format. Harvard at Newcastle is a modified author/date style and the most commonly used. However some people prefer a numbered style e.g. Vancouver or Vancouver superscript

Using EndNote to display the style

The Harvard at Newcastle style has been added to EndNote X9. For more information on using EndNote to manage your references see our EndNote Guide.

Remember when you cite you must be consistent and cite each type of references correctly for your chosen style. For more help with citing references use the online resource Cite them right.