Libraries

Communication

Purpose: To support research and teaching leading to undergraduate, masters, and doctors degrees in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication. Undergraduate areas of specialization include: advertising, broadcasting, journalism, public relations, and speech communication. Master's and doctoral degree areas of specialization include media, health, and social issues, and communication, organizations, and culture. The Murrow College of Communication also houses the Murrow Research Center for Media and Health Promotion, which focuses on the reception of media messages concerning health. 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.

Please note: Some links below are only accessible in the WSU Library or by WSU Faculty, Staff, and Students.

General Collection Guidelines:

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, in print and electronic forms, 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. Increasingly, materials are collected in digital format. WSU Libraries provides access to two large databases of communication journals, Communication and Mass Media Complete and ComAbstracts.
6. Date of Publication: Emphasis is on current materials. 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, and the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication advanced graphics and data analysis lab. 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.

    

   The WSU Libraries also provide electronic access through the online catalog, WSU WorldCat, to the holdings of university libraries throughout the United States and the world. Books and articles can be requested through WSU WorldCat, as well as through Illiad. The WSU Libraries pay inter-library loan fees for WSU researchers, making resources outside of the Libraries’ collections available to these researchers at no cost to them.

Observations and Qualifications by Subject with Collection Level:

Erica Carlson Nicol
Spring 2011