Best Bets
- International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance (1984+) This link opens in a new windowInternational Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text is the definitive research tool for the study of theatre and the performing arts. This database was initiated by the American Society for Theatre Research, and since 1984, the Theatre Research Data Center (TRDC) at Brooklyn College has published 14 volumes of the IBTD. These volumes comprise a fully indexed, cross-referenced and annotated databank of over 1.1 million journal articles, books, book chapters and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theater and performance in 126 countries. International Bibliography of Theater & Dance with Full Text contains more than 560 full-text titles, including more than 195 full-text journals, and more than 360 full-text books & monographs.
- Theatre in Context Collection (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. "O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works."
- Theatre in Video (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new windowcontains definitive performances of the world's leading plays, together with more than 100 film documentaries, online in streaming video.
- National Theatre Collection (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window"Volumes I & II bring the stage to life through access to high-definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies."
Theatre Databases
Play Collections
- American Drama 1714–1915 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window"Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 reflects American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented. Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller."
Now on the ProQuest platform. The Chadwyck Healey platform is no longer available. - Asian American Drama (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new windowContains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
- Black Drama (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new windowContains approximately 1200 plays by 200 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
- Eighteenth Century Drama (Adam Matthew) (1660-1824) This link opens in a new window"A unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays"
- English Drama (Proquest) This link opens in a new windowNow available on the Proquest platform.
"A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde." - Latino Literature : Poetry, Drama, and Fiction (Proquest) (1850+) This link opens in a new windowNow available on the Proquest platform.
Full text of hundreds of novels, short stories, poetry, and plays by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States. - National New Play Network This link opens in a new window"The New Play Exchange ® (NPX) is the world's largest digital library of scripts by living writers. The NPX, a National New Play Network program, is flipping the script on the ways in which new work is shared and discovered. National New Play Network (NNPN) is an alliance of professional theaters that collaborate in innovative ways to develop, produce, and extend the life of new plays."
- North American Indian Drama (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window" North American Indian Drama contains 256 plays by 49 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure."
- North American Women's Drama (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window"contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more."
- Twentieth Century North American Drama (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window"contains 2,059 plays by 434 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays."
- Twentieth Century Drama (Proquest) This link opens in a new window"Bringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth Century Drama is the essential resource for the study and research of the drama of this influential period.
Featuring plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong."
Available on the ProQuest platform. The Chadwyck Healey platform is no longer available.
General Databases
- BBC Shakespeare Plays (Ambrose Video) This link opens in a new window"Featuring some of Britain's most distinguished theatrical talent Ambrose Video is proud to be the exclusive distributor of Shakespeare's plays which are so richly rewarding to our viewers."
- British Theatre, Music, & Literature: High & Popular Culture (Nineteenth Century Collections Online) This link opens in a new windowBritish Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history. Covering more than a century, British Theatre, Music, and Literature is without equal as a resource for 19th century scholars.
- C19 : the nineteenth century index (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window"C19: The Nineteenth Century Index – the most comprehensive and dynamic source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives."
C19 has moved to the ProQuest platform. The Chadwyck Healey platform is no longer available. - Early English Books Online (EEBO) (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowContains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
Available on the ProQuest platform. The Chadwyck Healey platform is no longer available. - LinkedIn Learning This link opens in a new windowLinkedIn Learning offers online interactive video-based training on a wide range of topics, including software, design, and business skills. Applications include Adobe, MS Office, open-source applications, multimedia, web development, programming and more!
The UCF subscription to Lynda.com migrated to a new name "LinkedIn Learning" on August 19, 2019. See Migrating to LinkedIn Learning for more information. - Literature Criticism Online (Gale) This link opens in a new windowContemporary Literary Criticism Online covers more than 3,000 authors currently active or active during the later 20th century.
Almost 95% of critical essays from the print series Contemporary Literary Criticism Online are reproduced in full in this online collection, which combines multiple search and browse options with an engaging format that matches the look and content of the print originals.
Clear and accessible introductory essays are followed by carefully selected critical responses to help users engage with a variety of scholarly views and literary conversations. Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary literature will find this resource valuable.
- Literature Resource Center (Gale) This link opens in a new windowGale Literature Resource Center is Gale’s most current, comprehensive, and reliable online literature resource, offering the broadest and most representative range of authors and their works, including a deep collection of full-text critical and literary analysis for literary studies. The resource provides researchers with unbounding literary resources to support their literary responses, literary analysis, and thesis statements through a diversity of scholars and critics that ensure all views and interpretations are represented.
Researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world - MagillOnLiterature Plus (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowMagillOnLiterature Plus, produced by Salem Press, is the premier literary database, combining MagillOnLiterature and MagillOnAuthors. This database includes all the literary works, reviewed critical analyses and brief plot summaries that are included in MagillOnLiterature, as well as all the biographies and author essays included in MagillOnAuthors.
- Mango Languages This link opens in a new windowLearn a new language from Mango Languages. Choose from more than 70 languages, including Latin American Spanish and English for speakers of other languages. Access Mango via your computer or download an app to your mobile device.
- MLA International Bibliography (EBSCOhost) (1926+) This link opens in a new windowProduced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MLA International Bibliography is the definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film, covering scholarly publications from the early 20th century to the present. International in scope, it includes citations to journal articles, books, articles in books, series, translations, scholarly editions, websites, and dissertations, with links to full text in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other resources. The database also includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus, a proprietary, searchable collection of thousands of subject terms, and personal names used in indexing the bibliography.
- New York Times, Historical (ProQuest) (1851-2020) This link opens in a new windowComplete text and images of the New York Times.
- Play Finder in Lit Finder (Gale) This link opens in a new windowDatabase of play citations as well as literature and poems. To search Play Finder, Search in LitFinder and set the Type of Work to Play.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Florida Collection (1884+) This link opens in a new windowAccess image-based newspaper titles from Orlando and 12 other Florida communities plus the USA Today, browsing each edition as it was printed – including articles, photos, advertisements, obituaries, editorial cartoons and so much more.
Cocoa (1917- ); Ft. Lauderdale (1925- ); Ft. Myers (1884- ); Ft. Pierce (2021- ); Miami (1904-1988); Naples (1970- ); Orlando (1913- ); Pensacola (1889- ); St. Petersburg (1901- ); Stuart (1913- ); Tallahassee (1913- ); Tampa (1887- ); Vero Beach (1919- ); United States (2009-) - Readers' Guide Retrospective (H.W. Wilson - EBSCOhost) (1890-1982) This link opens in a new windowReaders’ Guide Retrospective™: 1890-1982 provides indexing of over three million articles from more than 550 leading magazines, including full coverage of the original print volumes of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature™. This important resource offers a wide range of researchers access to information about history, culture and seminal developments across nearly a century.
- Shakespeare in Performance (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window"goes behind the scenes to shine a light on how Shakespeare’s plays have been interpreted by theatre companies, actors and directors across the centuries. The resource features prompt books from the world-famous collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries."
- Show Music on Record (Library of Congress) This link opens in a new window"provides a reference list for commercially-released show music recordings, starting with those captured on early cylinders in the late 19th century and continuing through compact disc productions of the early 21st century."
- Times Digital Archive 1785-2019 This link opens in a new windowThe Times Digital Archive is an online, full-text facsimile of more than 200 years of The Times, with eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century news coverage. Created in 1785, the Times is the oldest daily newspaper in continuous publication. With over 12 million articles available, the archive supports research across multiple disciplines and areas of interest, including business, humanities, political science, and philosophy, along with coverage of all major international historical events.
- Trade Catalogues and the American Home (Adam Matthew) (1850-1950) This link opens in a new window"Explore domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950 with Trade Catalogues and the American Home. This resource presents a wealth of highly illustrated primary source documents that highlight commercial tastes and consumer trends, and provide a valuable visual record for a breadth of interdisciplinary study."
- Victorian Popular Culture (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window"This innovative portal invites readers into the darkened halls, small backrooms and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic and spiritualist séances.
The Victorian Popular Culture portal is an essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This resource contains a wide range of source material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930, and shows how interconnected these worlds were. As well as fascinating primary source material in the form of objects, printed books, ephemera, posters, photographs and playbills, the resource includes a number of tools to support teaching and research."
- Spiritualism, Sensation & Magic
- Circuses, Sideshows & Freaks
- Music Hall, Theatre & Popular Entertainment
- Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments & the Advent of Cinema - World's Fairs (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window"From the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle to the invention of television, chewing gum and hot dogs, world’s fairs have shaped our world. This resource digitises primary source material from hundreds of fairs – a vital collection for students of globalisation, imperialism, anthropology, mass communication, design and more.
This digital resource offers a unique insight into the phenomenon of international expositions. Over 200 world’s fairs and exhibitions, spanning 1829-2015, are represented through a range of primary sources. From planning committees to public reception and the legacy that remains, the impact of these global events can be examined in a comprehensive context.
World’s Fairs is a vital resource for students, teachers and researchers of a huge range of subjects including imperialism, race relations, gender studies, science and technology, consumer culture, architecture, design and more."
