Emily (Forwood) Rimland
Title: Sally W. Kalin Librarian for Learning Innovations Information Literacy Librarian and Learning Technologies Coordinator
The resources in this course guide will help you get started with finding sources for your speaking assignments, specifically the Campaign Advertisement assignment.
These resources cover many topics, but if you don’t find what you need please be sure to contact me, your CAS librarian (contact info on the right side of the screen).
Looking for political campaign ads? Try these sources:
The Living Room candidate— Presidential Campaign commercials from 1952-2008.
Youtube— has lots of campaign ads, including historical ads - just search for a candidate's name and the year of the election. See what the ads for Eisenhower were like!
Vanderbilt Television News Archive - The collection holds more than 30,000 evening news broadcasts, including commercials, from the major U.S. networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and more. Note that not all broadcasts are viewable online.
www.4president.us — this website has a nice collection of ads back to the 1960 presidential campaign.
EASE History - collection of presidential ads curated by Michigan State University
Political Campaigns (Political Communication Lab, Stanford University) - Search for national campaigns 2000-2008 or California Gubernatorial campagins 1994-2010.
NBC Learn — NBC broadcasts from the 1930s to today, including NBC news, ads, speeches, interviews, and more.
For more television news sources, consult the Libraries' Television News Program Sources research guide.
The Living Room candidate— Presidential Campaign commercials from 1952-2008.
Youtube— has lots of campaign ads, including historical ads - just search for a candidate's name and the year of the election. See what the ads for Eisenhower were like!
Vanderbilt Television News Archive - The collection holds more than 30,000 evening news broadcasts, including commercials, from the major U.S. networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and more. Note that not all broadcasts are viewable online.
www.4president.us — this website has a nice collection of ads back to the 1960 presidential campaign.
EASE History - collection of presidential ads curated by Michigan State University
Political Campaigns (Political Communication Lab, Stanford University) - Search for national campaigns 2000-2008 or California Gubernatorial campagins 1994-2010.
NBC Learn — NBC broadcasts from the 1930s to today, including NBC news, ads, speeches, interviews, and more.
For more television news sources, consult the Libraries' Television News Program Sources research guide.
Try these sources for newspaper articles, especially from the New York Times:
LionSearch -- search the Libraries' books, newspapers, journals and more, all at once! Try searching for: "political advertising" and the name of the candidate or year of your campaign.
National Journal — a news magazine dedicated to politics - it also does a good job of analyzing political ads.
Gale Virtual Reference Library -- The library’s version of Wikipedia! Good for a short, authoritative summary of a topic. Try it for researching the background and context of an ad.
Try searching the Penn State Library's CAT for:
Paley Center for Media iCollection — wonderful source for historical television programming, including streaming video of 18,000+ television shows, radio programs & commercials. Note: You do need to register and set a password when you first enter the database.
Newspaper Photo AP Archive — a wide range of photos and some video chronicling current and historical election campaigns - from the Associated Press.
The Internet Archive's Way Back Machine — find snapshots of a web sites going back to 1996, good for exploring defunct web sites from past campaigns.
For more resources about finding and analyzing ads, consult the Libraries' Advertisement research guide.
Need some more specialized sources? Here are a selected few to help you:
Congressional Research Service Report – Research papers written by the Library of Congress for the use of Congress. Provide objective, non-partisan analysis of public policy issues, but written in laymen’s terms.
Gallup - A veteran polling institution that has been tracking elections for over 60 years.
iPoll provides data from the Roper Center’s pubic opinion archives about a variety of issues.
OpenSecrets.org - "Your guide to the money in elections." By many standards the best of the websites, and certainly the most user-friendly guide to money in politics.
Global Issues in Context – Perspectives on international news and events
Try the United States Statistics and Data guide for a wide variety of statistical sources
