Barnard College Library
 Research Guide

BC3151: Theater History II
Professor Peter Campbell


Three women in window flirting
with three men outside window.
Copyright 1898. Prints and Photographs Division.
POS - TH - STO, no. 27 [C size].
 bibliographic record

 
Reference Books | Online Indexes and Databases
Useful Web Sites | Request a Consultation

 

Searching CLIO
  • For a TITLE search, leave off the initial article (the, an, le, etc.)
  • For an AUTHOR search, put last name, then first name
  • For a KEYWORD search, you must use and, or or not between the terms, or quotes for a phrase
  • Only use a UNIFORM TITLE search for anonymous works
  • Works on theater have call numbers starting with PN. You can find American drama in the PS330-50s and 620-30s, English drama in the PR600-700s and 1200s, French drama in the PQ500s and 1200s, and Russian drama in the PG3070-80s and 3240-50s.

REFERENCE BOOKS  

Title Barnard Reference Call Number
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature
Reader's Guide Retrospective
Readers' Guide Abstracts

AI3 .R48
American Decades Primary Sources E169.1 .A471977 2004
Women in World History: a Biographical Encyclopedia HQ1115 .W6 1999
Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 PN86 .L56
Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1981-1990: an International Bibliography PN1851 .C37 1997
The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre PN1861 .W67 1994
The Oxford Companion to the Theatre PN2035 .H3 1983
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance PN2035 .O92 2003g
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre PN2220 .B6 1992
Broadway: an Encyclopedic Guide to the History, People, and Places of Times Square PN2277 .N5 B56
British Writers PR85 .B688
Contemporary Authors Z1224 .C6
Literary Index

More reference resources: http://www.barnard.edu/library/websubj/theater.htm#Reference


ONLINE INDEXES AND DATABASES

The Databases (Reference Works & Indexes) list, which you can access from the Barnard Library home page or Columbia LibraryWeb, gives links to indexes for finding citations to journal articles.  The following will probably be the most relevant to your research:

America: History & Life
Coverage of United States and Canada, prehistory to the present, published after 1982. Citations, usually with abstracts from articles, book and media reviews, and dissertations.

American Memory
Full-text documents, maps, motion-pictures, prints and photographs, and sound recordings from the Library of Congress from 1692 to the present.

Art Index
2 part index to art periodicals in Western European languages: Part 1 (420 journal titles): from 1929-1984; Part 2(376 journal titles): from 1984 to the present. Beginning in 1994, abstracts are included. After the late 1990s, some full text is available (lacking illustrations).

CATNYP: The Research Libraries On-Line Catalog
The online catalog of the New York Public Libraries Research Libraries, including The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Dissertation Abstracts (Digital Dissertations)
Index to all U.S. and some foreign dissertations and selected masters essays. Most dissertations since 1997 (except for a small number not deposited with UMI) have 24-page previews and can be downloaded in PDF format.

Historical Abstracts
Citations and abstracts for publications related to world history, excluding the U.S. and Canada, from 1450 to the present published since 1982.

Historical Newspapers Online
Electronic form of the indexes to the London Times and the New York Times. When complete the indexes will offer coverage as follows: Official Index to the Times (London) 1906-1980; Palmer's Index to the Times (London) 1790-1905; Historical Index to the New York Times 1851-1923.

International Index to the Performing Arts
Multidisciplinary index to the performing arts from 1864-present (1864-1998 selectively). Citations and abstracts 1998-present.

Internet Movie Database
Searchable online movie database for films and TV shows made since 1892.

JSTOR
Full-text articles from more than 320 scholarly journals, from the first issue of each journal (including some started in the late nineteenth century) up to 3 to 5 years ago.  Only the science and social science articles have abstracts, so searching in the title is the most direct search for articles in humanities journals; searching for a term in the full text of an article will often find too many irrelevant articles     

LEO (Library Entrance Online)
The online catalog of the NYPL Branch Libraries including The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Circulating (Lending) Collections.

LION: Literature Online
A fully searchable library of more than 290,000 works of English and American poetry, drama, and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies, and key secondary sources.

MLA Bibliography
Citations from literature, linguistics, language, film, and folklore from 1963-present.

PCI: Periodicals Contents Index
An international, interdisciplinary index, especially useful for finding articles published in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

The Philosopher's Index
Index and abstracts of books and articles on aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics as well as the philosophy of history, law, science, education and other related fields. Indexes over 480 journals from 38 countries in eight languages from 1940-present.

ProQuest Direct
Full-text articles and abstracts from newspapers and periodicals in many disciplines, including international affairs, law, psychology, public affairs, sociology, women's studies, from 1988 to the present.  For scholarly journals, click on "Databases selected" at top, clear all databases and select PA Research II Periodicals, click on "Continue" at top, and select Advanced Search.

Women's Studies International
Citations from 1972-present for materials related to women's studies, gender studies, feminist theory and criticism.

WorldCat
WorldCat is a composite online catalog of the collections of the 24,000 member libraries of the OCLC consortium, comprising more than 36 million records for books, serials, manuscript collections, audiovisual materials, computer files, and other media.

 

USEFUL WEB PAGES

Barnard Sites:
Barnard Theater and Literature subject guides.

World Wide Web:
Try doing an advanced search using the search engine of your choice.

 

Updated 2/13/04
Jenna Freedman
Reference Librarian
Barnard College Library