Communication

Purpose: To support research and teaching leading to undergraduate, masters, and doctors degrees in the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication. Undergraduate areas of specialization include: advertising, broadcasting, journalism, public relations, and speech communication. Master's degree areas of specialization include: interpersonal and organizational communication, rhetoric, and mass media. Included in the mass media emphasis are broadcasting, public relations, journalism, advertising and media management. These programs integrate relevant knowledge from diverse fields such as business, education, English, engineering, law, political science, psychology, sociology, as well as the core areas of speech and mass communication. At present, communication programs are not offered at any of the branch campuses, but courses are taught at WSU Tri-Cities.

The current collection is adequate for undergraduate instruction in the areas of specialization, but additional materials for faculty and graduate student research should be provided. In 1998, a Ph.D. program in Communication will be implemented. In the interim, Ph.D. students may enroll in the interdisciplinary studies doctoral program.

1. Languages: English is the primary language of collection. Highly selective purchases may be made in Romance or Germanic languages, i.e., rhetoric, primarily. Works written in other languages are ordinarily purchased only in English translation.
2. Chronological Guidelines: Primary emphasis is on materials in the twentieth century, particularly those which are most current. There is selective acquisition of historical materials.
3. Geographical Guidelines: Primary focus of interest is on materials from the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. There may be selective acquisition of materials in other geographical areas.
4. Treatment of the Subject: Popular materials and upper-division textbooks are selectively acquired. Lower-division textbooks and juvenile materials are not ordinarily purchased. Collections of writings by journalists, histories, case studies, and biographies are selectively acquired.
5. Types of Material: Books and periodicals are the major types of materials collected. Basic reference materials, such as indexes, abstracts, encyclopedias, directories, etc., are purchased. Government documents, Federal and Washington State, are collected extensively. Serial publications such as proceedings of congresses or conferences, reports of special investigations, etc., are acquired selectively. Electronic resources, defined as materials requiring the use of computers for access, will be considered for purchase, subject to the general collection guidelines.
6. Date of Publication: Emphasis is on materials published since 1980. Retrospective purchasing is very selective and may involve microform, reprints, or photocopies rather than the original format.
7. Other General Considerations: Other campus libraries whose holdings supplement those of Holland and Terrell Libraries are the Education Library and the Owen Science and Engineering Library. Additional resources on the WSU campus include the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, which provides assistance with statistical analysis and access to federal census data tapes. Also, the Holland and Terrell Libraries purchases ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) magnetic data tapes which are housed at the Media Materials Center. As a supplement to Holland and Terrell Libraries' legal materials, the University of Idaho's Law Library may be used for in-depth legal research.