Webinar Replay: The Value of Magazine Archives in Academic Research

Library Resources | September 07, 2017

Magazine archives play an important role in academic research, providing context around events, trends and public opinion at crucial points in time.

Magazine archives can be used by students in multiple disciplines, from theater and film students researching a look for costumes and props in a period piece, to sociology students researching the changing representation of men and women of color in advertisements and cover stories over the years, to journalism students observing writing and media trends through time.

Heather Peckham Emerson, product services manager at EBSCO, recently hosted the webinar, "The Value of Magazine Archives in Academic Research". She demonstrated how magazine archives could be used as primary source documents that capture a moment in history. With advertisements and articles drawn from Time and People, she provided examples of how to trace a trend through the years as well as how to research a subject over a span of time using just one magazine, in this case Bloomberg Businessweek covering the higher profile of women in business through the years.

Key takeaways about magazine archives:

They highlight trends in journalism and how the written coverage of historical events influenced public perspective.
They illustrate trends over time in popular culture that affected personal appearance, style and values.
They showcase the evolution of media trends in the areas of graphic publishing styles, photography, artwork and fashion.
They can be searched by individual title for in-depth research of a topic or event.
They can be searched as a group of multiple titles to gather various political and social viewpoints of the same event.

Interested in learning more about researching with magazine archives? You can watch the replay of the webinar here. To request more information on magazine archives available from EBSCO, please visit our website.

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