• Thematic Guide to Modern Drama.
• The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama

Plays and Theater

• The Cambridge Guide to Theatre
• The Oxford Dictionary of Plays
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance

Websites, Image Databases and More

• the Playbill Vault.
• John Johnson Collection:  An Archive of Printed Ephemera (includes historical playbills)

• ARTStor
• Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Library of Congress American Memory Project
• New York Public Library  digital collections

Streaming Videos

• Dance in Video
• Opera in video
• Digital Theatre (live performance by leading British theatre companies)
• Films from Kanopy

• Costume Design (general)

Evaluating Information

I. JumboSearch for Books

The library's catalog includes ebooks from the following collections, which you can search separately as well:

• Double check in the e-book collections below:
• ACLS Humanities E-Book
• Library Stack (independent ebooks on art, architecture, media studies, ...
• SAGE Knowledge (social Sciences)


• All Subjects:
• eBook Collection (in EBSCOhost)
• JSTOR
• Project MUSE
• ProQuest EBook Central

 

Note: WorldCat (renamed to be Libraries Worldwide on the Tisch Library homepage) is still a better place to get a fuller picture of  books on a topic, even though interlibrary loan service is currently very limited.)

 

2. Check the Boston Public Library's catalog for eBooks (and  sign up for a BPL eCard , Tufts students and faculty eligible)

3. "Digital books" on Internet Archive

4. Open Educational Resources (OER)
online alternatives that are accessible and free to all students

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II. Academic Journal Articles

• JSTOR
• Project Muse

 

• In EBSCOhost databases, you can select to search across the following databases, among others:
• America: History & Life
• Bibliography of Asian Studies
• Historical Abstracts (World History and Culture)
• MLA International Bibliography (for drama criticism & theater history)
• Women's Studies International

The database below is on a different platform:

• Performing Arts Periodicals Database
  (for reception:
      -- "dramatic criticism" in Scholarly journals
      -- "theatre reviews" in popular press and trade publications.)

 

More Sources Current Production Reviews

III. Magazines, Newspapers and the Companies' Websites

• Access World News (rich regional news)
• Factiva (more international coverage of news)

• Internet Broadway Database
• the Lortel Archive (Off-Broadway)
• Ticketmaster

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For past theatre reviews

Historical Magazines and Newspapers

• American Periodicals (1740 - 1940)
• British Periodicals (1680s - 1930s)
• New York Times Online Archive (1851 - three years before the current date)
• Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)
• Times of London (1785 - 1985)