USF Library Blog

As a mass communications student, research is an essential part of our academic makeup. We must research to report. How can we inform the people without researching our informative elements? We can't.  It is important to know how to use the different databases for research.  So many pieces of information are available to you through the internet and these research databases can make your research a lot easier.  Thanks to technology, with the click of a button we are able to check senators' salaries, the Florida lobbyist list and how much my boss's house costs.

Working for a senatorial campaign, I am able to use many databases to find public records.  At the office I had access to individual campaign contributions and voter registration records.  As a journalist, I can use public records for just about anything and it will make my story plausible.  

This trip to the library is always helpful when conducting research for a class project.  There are so many databases for so many different subjects.  It really is incredible the amount of resources that are available to us as students.

One day we will have to use public records to write a story.  Those databases such as Lexis Nexis and CQ Researcher will make the story better.  The facts you retrieve from the databases will make the story more credible, giving your reader more incentive to watch, listen to or read your stories again and again.