The librarian is: BLOGGING | Journalism Library, Columbia University

Hitting the streets of your beat for the first time? Make sure to head out there hungry - both for a great story and a great meal. Some of NYC’s best food never makes it into Zagat’s, so an essential website for learning about your neighborhood’s cuisine is Chowhound. Recently re-designed, Chowhound has discussion boards for food in all areas of New York City. Covering an area in Manhattan? Search the Manhattan board. Covering a beat that’s farther afield? Try the Outer Boroughs board.

Remember that resources like Chowhound thrive on user input, so once you’ve sampled the cuisine your beat has to offer, weigh in with your own comments!

The Katrina Files is the latest report from the
UCLA-based Center for Communications and Community. It includes critiques of Hurricane Katrina coverage, community and independent media, research reports on Katrina and its aftermath, and a section for the public to submit materials.

[Thanks to Prof. June Cross for suggesting this site!]

Perhaps you have already been assigned a beat neighborhood, or a community district to cover, and are not sure exactly what a community district is, or where your beat is located? Here are some ways to start discovering your new beat.

Scoping Out Your Beat is a guide with links to some crucial resources, including the Department of City Planning website (which includes Community District Profiles), and the Gotham Gazette’s Community Gazettes section (note that Gotham Gazette uses council district, rather than community district, to organize its site.

Your professor may have mentioned some books available in the Journalism Library, called Community District Needs. These books are published annually by the Dept of City Planning, and there is one volume per borough. We have two sets of the most recent (FY 2007) books at the library.

Please note that the community district profiles posted on the Dept of City Planning website include almost all of the information in the books. What’s missing from the website? The detailed memo from each community board, which spells out what each district needs from the City in terms of improvements and funding. So, if you are going to take a look at the Community District Needs books at the library, no need to photocopy the entire section. Just photocopy the memo, and you can get the rest online!

Welcome, Class of 2007! Here are the links that I visited during my talk today.

Columbia University Libraries

CLIO, Columbia’s library catalog

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (NYT and other newspapers, scanned as PDF, back to 19th century) (Access restricted to current Columbia affiliates)

Ethnic Newswatch (full text of ethnic newspapers from US & Canada, English and Spanish language) (Access restricted to current Columbia affiliates)

LexisNexis (Access restricted to current Columbia affiliates)

Infoshare Online (all kinds of data about NYC by neighborhood, community district, and more!) (Access restricted to current Columbia affiliates)

Created for the incoming Class of 2007. Apologies for the speed, the camera battery was running out of juice.

Welcome to the Journalism School, Class of ‘07 broadcast students!

This post duplicates the handout provided to students during the broadcast RWI research training sessions.

Master’s projects:

To locate broadcast Master’s projects from prior years, visit the index, available online at: www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/jour/masters/

TV projects are available to borrow from the Journalism Library (ask at the Circulation Desk for project title and year it was completed). Radio projects are also available at the Journalism Library, and online at: www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/radio/masters/index.asp

Stock footage sources (tips from Prof. June Cross)

National Archives website: www.archives.gov/research/formats/film-sound-video.html

Library of Congress (make sure to check copyright status before using!):
www.loc.gov/film/arch.html

Local museums and historical societies
Museums: www.ny.com/museums/all.museums.html
Historical societies: www.nyhistory.com/links/historical_societies.htm

Other resources of interest

AccuNet/AP multimedia archive : photos, text, audio, graphics. (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) This resource has AP photographs back to the mid-19th century, as well as audio content.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers. (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) This database contains full historical archives of the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. It is an entire run of newspapers on microfilm, retrievable on your computer!

Television News Archive.(access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) The TVNA has been taping the nightly network news since 1968. While very limited broadcast content (from CNN) is available streaming on the TVNA site, the searchable archive enables you to see how each network covered events on a given day, how long the segments were, and even what advertisements were shown.