Books and Reference
Watch the video below to learn more about searching in ASA: the online library catalog.
Theatre Databases
Characteristics:
- Cover numerous topics
- May contain multiple types of sources (e.g. popular, trade, scholarly)
- Audience = educated readership
Examples:
- Research Library This link opens in a new windowIndexes, abstracts and provides selective full-text for a broad spectrum of magazines, journals and newspapers.
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new windowIndexes, abstracts and provides selective full-text for a broad spectrum of magazines, journals and newspapers.
- JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive This link opens in a new windowFull text of scholarly journals, beginning with the very first issue of each title. Primarily humanities and social sciences titles.
View the video below for tips on searching for articles.
Characteristics:
- Pertain to a particular discipline
- Often contain scholarly sources, known as peer-reviewed articles
- Articles are written and reviewed by experts in the field
- Academic audience
- Showcase original research
Examples:
- Proquest One Literature This link opens in a new windowFully searchable library of over 260,000 full text works of English and American literature. Contains full text of plays, poems and fiction from the year 600 to the present in English including Shakespeare and the Bible. Newest offerings include African-American poetry to 1900 with more works forthcoming.
- Shakespeare in Performance This link opens in a new windowThis resource features over 1,000 prompt books for performances of Shakespeare's plays and provides a wealth of information about staging, set design, costumes, etc.
- Editions & Adaptations of Shakespeare This link opens in a new window"Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare contains eleven major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863–66, twenty-eight separate contemporary printings of individual plays and poems, selected apocrypha and related works. In addition it contains more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the whole of Bell's Acting Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1774)."
Characteristics:
- Written by columnists
- Audience = general public
- Full of images
Examples:
- Sports Illustrated
- Vogue
Characteristics:
- Written by columnists, journalists, and/or reporters
- Coverage = current events
- Articles written at 8th grade reading level
Examples:
- Morning Call This link opens in a new windowCoverage from 1984 through today, including full-text, web-only content and full-color image edition.
Search Techniques
1. Once you know your research interest, formulate it into a question and use the most important parts to generate keywords. Here, "Star Wars" and "myth" are the key parts of the topic, so those will be the keywords.
2. You can then use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to better refine your search.
