Communication Research Guide

The Archive's collection now includes over 100,000 items, covering some 70,000 individual titles. The site includes film and video documenting the history of the Academy and the Academy Foundation; film, kinescope and videotape of Academy Awards ceremonies extending back to 1949; Academy Award-nominated films in all categories, including documentaries, shorts, and foreign films; and visual effects and technical achievements information.

Housed at the University of Maryland, the archives of Mass Media & Culture (MMC) contain wide-ranging collections documenting the history of both commercial and public broadcasting in the United States. Materials cover the business of radio and television, the histories of corporations and trade organizations, the operations and programming of stations and networks, and the careers of executives, writers, performers, producers and engineers.

The Paley Archive is made up of over 160,000 television and radio programs and advertisements, covering more than a century of media history, beginning with a 1918 speech by labor leader Samuel Gompers. The collection spans all genres: comedy, drama, news, public affairs, performing arts, children's, sports, reality, animation, and documentary. The Archive also includes an international presence, with assets collected from seventy countries.

The Library is home to more than 1.1 million film, television, and video items. With a collection ranging from motion pictures made in the 1890s to today's TV programs, the Library's holdings are an unparalled record of American and international creativity in moving images.
The Library of Congress also holds the nation's largest public collection of sound recordings containing music, spoken word and radio broadcasts, nearly 3.5 million recordings in all. Over 110 years of sound recordings history is represented in nearly every audio format, from cylinders to CDs, covering a wide range of subjects and genres in considerable depth and breadth.

The Archive constitutes one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States, with more than 220,000 motion picture and television titles and 27 million feet of newsreel footage.

IMDb lists cast and crew, box office, production credits, locations, short synopses, and links to reviews.

The trade paper of the entertainment industry, Variety reviews films, reports box office, carries feature articles on directors and producers, as well as covering the music, stage, and TV. The web site is open. Variety is also found in Academic OneFile (1997- ) and Lexis-Nexis Academic (1993- ).

Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. It’s anonymized (no one is personally identified), categorized (determining the topic for a search query) and aggregated (grouped together).

Through Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, the Applied Social Media Lab gives industry-trained technologists the freedom to build social media solutions that center the public interest.

The NU Social Media Lab studies how social media — defined broadly as technologies that facilitate social behavior among people — are used for work and play. We are interested in understanding both how social media are used today, and how technologies might be designed to better support people’s existing goals and enable them to do new things. Check out their publications and projects!