Rethinking the reference collection: exploring benchmarks and e-book availability

Librarians in the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh explored the possibility of developing an electronic reference collection that would replace the print reference collection, thus providing access to these valuable materials to a widely dispersed user population. The librarians evaluated the print reference collection and standard collection development lists as potential benchmarks for the electronic collection, and they determined which books were available in electronic format. They decided that the low availability of electronic versions of titles in each benchmark group rendered the creation of an electronic reference collection using either benchmark impractical.     

Media violence research: Interpreting the findings

The pages which follow are an attempt to stand back and assess what we know about the effects of media violence in an effort to sort into a usable pattern the results of hundreds of reported studies. Timothy P. Meyer is assistant professor of speech in Mass Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; James A. Anderson is associate professor of radio‐television and director of the Broadcast Research Center at Ohio University, Athens.     

Speaking Like a State: Listening to Benjamin Franklin in Times of Terror

This essay reconstitutes Benjamin Franklin's characteristic political style as a particular inflection of liberal irony, arguing for a way of speaking today that checks arrogance with humility and attempting to unlock the psychosocial economy of political enjoyment implicit in this rhetoric. To do so, the essay traverses four bodies of discourse (including recent political thinking about civic character, Franklin's oratory in 1787 at the constitutional convention, passages from his letters, and an excerpt from his autobiography) in order to extract strategies for managing situations in which democracy becomes prone to the enjoyments of terror and tyranny.     

Sequential structure in televised social behavior

Karl Erik Rosengren, Lawrence A. Wenner, &; Philip Palmgreen (Eds.). Media gratifications research: Current perspectives. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985. 312 pp. $25.00 (cloth)

James A. Anderson. Communication research: Issues and methods. New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1987.423 pp. $32.95 (cloth)

Joseph R. Dominick &; James E. Fletcher (Eds.). Broadcasting research methods. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1985. 330 pp. $38.50 (cloth)

Roger D. Wimmer &; Joseph R. Dominick. Mass media research: An introduction (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1987. 514 pp. $36.00 (cloth)

Renata Adler. Reckless disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS, et al. and Sharon v. Time. New York: Knopf, 1986. 243 pp. $16.95 (cloth)

Rodney A. Smolla. Suing the press. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 277 pp. $19.95 (cloth)

L. Rowell Huesmann &; Leonard D. Eron (Eds.). Television and the aggressive child: A cross‐national comparison. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1986. 314 pp. $36.00 (cloth)

Tannis MacBeth Williams (Ed.). The impact of television: A natural experiment in three communities. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986.446 pp. $53.00 (cloth), $34.95 (paper)

Margaret B. W. Graham. RCA and the videodisc player: The business of research. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 258 pp. $19.95 (cloth)