Communication

A joint initiative from the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, this "free, open-source reference book" teaches both aspiring journalists and career professionals how to use data (and its analysis) to improve reporting of the news. In addition to helping journalists, this resource is useful for those in Communication fields to understand how they can use statistics and numbers to support and enhance major points in reports and publications.

Historic and contemporary speeches by women, sponsored by Sweet Briar College.

An extensive database of movies and television with plot summaries and detailed lists of the people involved.

Significant selections from the National Media Museum, UK's physical collections are included here as part of their digital collections. Clicking the "Collections" tab from the top tool bar leads you to the main page where you can choose to browse the "National Photography Collection", "National Cinematography Collection", "National Television Collection", "National New Media Collection" or if you click "Collections Online", you can search through "a database of 230,000+ objects from the collections of the Science Museum, the National Railway Museum" and the National Media Museum (it seems the database cannot be browsed so you must utilize the search box to retrieve information or images for a particular object or person).

Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, and more.

The American Presidency Project offers transcripts of all inaugural addresses plus state of the union messages, radio addresses, debates, FDR's Fireside chats, and more.

Another useful resource from The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence (as well as a supplement to their annual "State of the News Media" report), this site provides "an interactive database of companies that own news properties in the United States" and is organized by tabs that examine "the main sectors of media including newspapers, online, network, cable and local TV, magazines, radio...."

Michael Quinion, a British dictionary editor (for the Oxford English Dictionary) and "word specialist" (including author of several books on words and their evolution) has created an amazing site dedicated to the ever-evolving words of the English language. "World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech."

"More than 16,000 images of outdoor advertisements and other scenes [including billboard ads, bus shelter ads, murals and posters from big name companies such as Chevrolet, Del Monte, Heinz, Pepsi-Cola, just to name a few] from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the primary professional organization in the field." "Duke University Libraries originally created the descriptive metadata for the collection as part of the Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD) database...". "The advertisements may be viewed and printed out by anyone for research, teaching, private study, or general interest. For any other uses of these advertisements", a link is provided to "the Copyright & Citation policy for the ROAD project". The collection may be searched by company name, product, date, place, subject, tone and medium.

Choose "Media & Technology" from the Topic drop-down box, to focus your search through the many audio and video files available.

"The Forum Network is a PBS and NPR public media service in collaboration with public stations and community partners across the United States." Their goal is "to bring a diverse range of perspectives on both local and global issues to audiences around the world." Their "online [audio/video] library features thousands of lectures by some of the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders, available to citizens of the world for free."

"The EUscreen project [coordinated by Sonja de Leeuw, Professor at the University of Utrecht] aims to promote the use of television content to explore Europe's rich and diverse cultural history." "EUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s until today." Click on the "Explore" option to get started. You will find, you can explore videos by "Topics", "Genres", "Languages" (choose from nineteen different languages, including English; note that even when videos are in a foreign language, they all contain a brief, written summary in English), "Providers" and "Decades".

"The OTRR Group is a community of enthusiastic fans, avid listeners, and strong supporters of 'Old Time Radio'." "The mission of the...Group is to accurately preserve classic old time radio series from the past in order for future generations to enjoy them." "The group’s goals include restoring, preserving and sharing the classic shows from what is commonly known as the "Golden Age of Radio" (1930-1960)." One of the premier sites for information about old time radio collections, be sure to check out the "Project OTR.db" link which includes "over 1,880 [classic radio] series listing over 173,000 episodes" [Note: these are just the listings, not audio links to hear the actual programs], the OTR Art" link "for the largest collection of OTR Art anywhere" and the "Publications" link for "the largest collection of OTR periodicals on the net."

RFERL's mission is to "report the news in 21 countries ["including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia"] where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established." They "...provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate." Click on the various country and continent tabs from the tool bar at the top of the page to retrieve the latest news for each area.