of these so far are either bibliographic databases, or electronic ver-
sions of reference works such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, company
information, etc.
The big advantage of CD-ROM sources is that they can be
searched far more easily and in far more sophisticated ways than
conventional printed versions of the same material. For instance a set
of academic journal articles or abstracts can be searched for any
mention of both say ‘information’ and ‘politics’ in the same article or
abstract – or within so many words of each other.
In principle CD-ROM as well as DVD format material can be used
to present exciting interactive multimedia teaching materials.
Unfortunately only a limited amount of relevant materials are yet
available. An instance is Boynton (1996) on The Art of Campaign
Advertising, which includes samples of US political advertising. Two
articles which review political CD-ROM material are Ludlam (1997)
and Luna and McKenzie (1997).
ONLINE DATABASES
Just as there are so many journals that no library is likely to have all
the relevant journals, there are now so many bibliographic databases
that no library is likely to have all of them either in printed or CD-
ROM versions. Fortunately most academic libraries now have access
via SuperJANET to literally hundreds of databases held at computer
centres like Dialog in California. These online systems are somewhat
less user-friendly than the CD-ROM versions mentioned earlier so
that you may have to ask a librarian to search for you, but this does
mean that, in a sense, the resources of most of the world’s major
libraries can be searched from any one of them.
Not only bibliographic databases are accessible in this form, but
also a number of ‘full-text’ databases are available, including for
instance the full text of the Harvard Business Reviewand recent
issues of theGuardianand other quality newspapers. Thus a required
article can be downloaded onto your own computer and quotations
from it pasted into the assignment you are writing. Where the full
text is not available a fax of any article indexed can usually be sent.
APPENDIX: SOURCES ON POLITICS 245