A library instruction session will be held in PAC 102 on Friday, September 30, from 10:00-10:50 a.m.

RESEARCH GUIDES
Penn State subject librarians have set up Research Guides to help students navigate the library resources in particular subject areas. You may find helpful sources in a research guide specific to your chosen concept. For example, if your concept is “product placement” or “branding,” the Advertising Research Guide will be useful.

IDEAS
Take a look at some of the links in the IDEAS section if you haven’t chosen a concept yet.

BACKGROUND SOURCES
CQ Researcher – collection of reports covering political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy. If you don’t have a specific topic in mind, try browsing using the menu on the left side of the CQ page.

Gale Virtual Reference Library is a good place to begin when you need basic background information and a general overview of a concept. For example, try searching “emotional intelligence” and you will find entries from subject encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology,” the “Encyclopedia of Social Psychology,” and the “Encyclopedia of Human Development.”

DATABASES
Library-subscription databases provide access to high-quality, credible sources for peer-reviewed journal articles.

• Academic Search Complete is a user-friendly database containing articles from most disciplines.

• Access World News (NewsBank) – contains the electronic editions of local, regional, and national U.S. newspapers as well as full-text content of key international sources.

You may need to use the Get It! link to access the full text of some articles.

How do I evaluate the information I find on a website?
Take a look at the criteria on the Library Information and Services page, “How do I. . . evaluate information?”

Citing Your Sources
Refer to Penn State York’s MLA 7th Edition Quick Reference (April 2010) for guidelines and examples for citing sources.
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EXAMPLE CONCEPT: Product placement

I chose the Advertisements Research Guide from the broad category Communications and looked at the Websites tab. Since you are allowed to use websites for this assignment, it is an advantage to begin with reputable sites recommended by a library research guide. I chose to follow the link to AdAge.

I found some really good articles by searching their site for the term “product placement,” including the article published this week called “Twitter Landing More TV Roles Than Most of Product Placement’s Top Practitioners.” This was an easy way to find a good example of the concept.

I used the Advertising research guide to find links to recommended databases and, using the Communications and Mass Media database found a recent (2011) article titled “Product Placement in Movies and on Broadway” which provided additional examples of the concept.

Then, I used the Image Databases research guide to find links to sources for images. Under the “News Images” tab, I followed the link to the Newspaper Photos (AP) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of news photos provided by the Associated Press. Information about the photos, and how to credit them, is contained with each image. The image shown above is a publicity photo from the 2011 film “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” a documentary examining the world of product placement, with a unique twist – the film was paid for entirely through product placement and marketing deals.

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LionSearch
LionSearch is a new interface to the combined resources provided by the Penn State University Libraries.