Theatre Research Guide
- Find Background Info
- Find Books and Articles
- Find Scripts and Dialect Resources
- Find Lighting, Scenic and Sound Design Resources
- Find Images, Fashion and Costume Design Resources
- Find the Performing Arts Collection
- Citing Sources
Find Background Info
Background sources, such as specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, are an essential piece of the research process. They can help you:
- Gather information about your topic and understand the scope of the research.
- Locate reliable sources and to clarify keywords.
- Pinpoint important authors, texts, ideas, and keywords about the research area—knowing what the primary phrases and concepts are will help you a lot as you are searching through library databases and online sources.
Credo Reference
Credo Reference is a multi-publisher collection of high-quality reference titles covering everything from the arts to astronomy, law to literature, and science to Shakespeare. Available titles also include a range of multimedia options including thousands of high-quality diagrams, photographs, maps, and audio files.
Search Theatre on Credo Reference
Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
An authoritative reference covering primarily actors, playwrights, directors, styles and movements, companies, and organizations.
Search Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
Hemispheric Institute of the Americas
Digital project from NYU Libraries and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics that "provides a digital venue for documenting the expression of social and political life through performance." Including performances, interviews, lectures, and presentations.
Search Hemispheric Institute of the Americas
Index to Plays 1800–1926
Index of plays covering 1800–1926, searchable by author, title, and subject.
Find Books and Articles
Find Books
Print and e-books are valuable sources for academic research. They will help you to gain an overview of your topic and often contain in-depth information about the scholarship or history of research on a subject. Some books are written by single authors, while others include essays or chapters by multiple scholars within a discipline. Don’t let the length of books intimidate you because you don’t need to read them from cover to cover. Look at the table of contents and index to find the sections that are relevant to your work.
Find Books Using GriffinSearch
GriffinSearch is a good starting place if you are looking for books, journal articles, films, and other materials available in the library. In addition to searching the Giovale Library catalog for physical materials, GriffinSearch finds e-books and articles from several of our databases. To get started, search by keyword or type in the title of a book here:
Digital Theatre+
Digital Theatre Plus includes video resources, interviews, study guides, essays, and lesson plans. Digital Theatre Plus includes productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC, Frantic Assembly, BroadwayHD, the Lincoln Center Theatre, the Old Vic, the Stratford Festival, Shakespeare’s Globe, Gecko Theatre, L.A. Theatre Works, the Royal Opera House, the Almeida Theatre, the English National Ballet, and many more.
Academic Videos Online (AVON)
Academic Videos Online (AVON) provides unlimited access to a comprehensive selection of videos curated for the educational experience.
Search Academic Videos Online (AVON)
WorldCat
WorldCat lets you search for books, articles, videos, and other material that are available in libraries worldwide. If you are doing in-depth research on a topic and are considering requesting resources through Interlibrary Loan, WorldCat can help you discover resources that might not be in the Giovale Library collection.
Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
Interlibrary Loan is a service where patrons of one library can borrow books and other materials, and access journal articles that are owned by another library.
Explore Interlibrary Loan Materials
Utah Academic Library Consortium
Giovale Library participates in the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) and Westminster University students have reciprocal circulation privileges at UALC partner libraries.. Each UALC library has different circulation policies, but all require a current, valid, legal photo identification and proof of current enrollment at Westminster. Some libraries may also require other verification methods, so it is recommended that you contact the library you are interested in for details.
Popular Titles and Featured Texts
Theatre and the macabre
Research Methods in the Dance Sciences
Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal
On the Queerness of Early English Drama: Sex in the Subjunctive
Find Articles
The Giovale Library provides access to a number of subject databases that you can use to find journal articles on topics within a specific discipline or field of study. The databases listed on this page are those that are most useful for finding research published in the field of data science.
JSTOR
JSTOR is an archive of full text articles from Journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It includes retrospective coverage of publications as well as access to many current journals.
Fine Arts
The Fine Arts database includes the full text of journal articles on topics related to theatre, music, visual art, art history, and film.
MLA International Bibliography
The MLA International Bibliography, produced by the Modern Language Association, contains citations for journal articles, books, and dissertations concerning literature, modern language studies, and drama.
Find Scripts and Dialect Resources
Find Scripts
Access to scripts is a vital part of Theatre research, performance and learning. The following subscription and open resources are listed to aid in script discovery.
Drama Texts Collection
Drama Texts Collection spans nearly a millennium of dramatic writing covering the historical canon of Western theatre from its earliest days right up to the key figures of the early 21st century. It provides the most studied and performed plays of canonical playwrights as well as their less well-known contemporaries, allowing for a comprehensive survey. It also delivers a rich additional database of related ephemera, including posters, playbills, photos, and theatre diagrams.
Folger Shakespeare Library
Free resource to all Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. Access to full-text editions, images, interviews and articles from artists and scholars.
Search Folger Shakespeare Library
Archive of Voices
NYU Tisch Drama provides Archive of Voices, a curated collection of plays by a multiplicity of underrepresented, marginalized, and minoritarian voices.
Women Writers Project
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project out of Northeastern University dedicated to bringing early modern women’s writing (pre-Victorian) out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience.
BIPOC Playwrights Project
The BIPOC Playwrights Project, hosted by the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance studies at UC Berkeley is a website dedicated to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Peoples of Color) Playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries, whose works are in English or with English translations widely available. Each playwright profile includes a brief bio, a list of works, and links to online texts or resources.
Search BIPOC Playwrights Project
Playscripts
From popular one-act plays to award winning full-length plays and musicals, Playscripts has hundreds of titles for college and university theatre programs. Playscripts is home to some of the most lauded voices of the 21st century.
Non-Binary Monologues
A submission portal of monologues solely dedicated to non-binary voices.
Dramatists Play Service
Dramatists Play Service is a great resource for searching for and browsing plays from all genres.
Search Dramatists Play Service
Concord Theatricals
Concord Theatricals is another great resource for finding and browsing plays from all genres.
Dialect Resources
Open resources to aid in learning accents and dialects for non-native and native English speakers.
International Dialects of English Archive
International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) is an online archive of primary source recordings of English language dialects and accents heard around the world.
Search International Dialects of English Archive
The Speech Accent Archive
The Speech Accent Archive presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.
Find Lighting, Scenic and Sound Design Resources
Looking for resources to help with lighting, sound, or scenery technology? Explore the following resources to get started.
The Lighting Archive
Modern theatrical lighting is a unique art form, whose history until now has been exceedingly difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. The Lighting Archive website is developing a collection of actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets from real shows. Emphasis is placed on historical productions and designers who have made important contributions to the field.
Scenic and Lighting Design
Scenic and Lighting Design curated by Matt Kizer is a subscription and open-source repository of tools used for storytelling with lighting, scenery, and technology since 1986. The open-source labs are available tools to explore. Check out Colorlab, Gobos, and Lightlab.
Search Open Access Labs for Scenic & Lighting Design
ETC
ETC is an international leader in events lighting technology. From control consoles and rigging hoists, to architectural lighting and fixtures, ETC provides the theatre and architectural industries with innovative solutions and products. ETC offers a manuals section for research and how-to.
Golden Artists Colors
Learn how to mix and create colors for scenery. Includes videos, a virtual color mixer, articles, and other mixing resources.
BBC Sound Effects
The BBC Sound Effects Archive is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are clips from across the world from the past 100 years. As well as browsing and searching through this treasure trove of sounds, you can also make and share your own mixes and soundscapes using the ‘mixer mode’ function. Use the mixer to layer, edit and re-order clips from the archive to create your own sounds.
Library of Congress National Jukebox
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.
Find Images, Fashion and Costume Design Resources
Cashin Collection of Fashion, Theater, and Film Costume Design
The Bonnie Cashin Collection of Fashion, Theater, and Film Costume Design digital archive at UCLA spanning 1913-2000 consists of design illustrations, writings on design, contractual paperwork, photographs, and press materials including press releases and editorial coverage of her work.
The Costar Project
The Department of Dramatic Art at UNC-Chapel Hill has extensive collections of clothing from across the centuries and around the globe. This digital image archive features 19th and 20th century garments from Europe and the United States.
Europeana
Europe’s digital cultural heritage archive includes art, film, books and music from thousands of cultural institutions. Search for relevant topics performing arts, theater production, costume design, etc.
Search Costume Design on Europeana – Drawings
Search Costume Design on Europeana – Costumes
The Kyoto Costume Institute Digital Archives
A digital image archive of fashion and costume spanning from the 1700’s to 2010’s.
Search The KCI Digital Archives
The Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America makes millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience.
Search The DPLA for costume design
The National Portrait Gallery in London
The National Portrait Gallery is home to the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Search works spanning from the 8th century to the present day.
Search costume design at the National Portrait Gallery
The Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design
The Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design is a valuable source of documentation on the history of theatre and is housed in The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaigne. It is a rare collection of original materials on the theatre and productions in England and the United States. These materials include costume and set designs, sketches, notes, photographs, prop lists, storyboards, and swatches of fabric.
Artstor Public Collections
Explore collections of images and primary sources from libraries, museums, and archives around the world on JSTOR. Some collections will not be available as Giovale does not have a subscription to Artstor but does have access to the public collections.
Find the Performing Arts Collection
The Giovale Library has a collection of Performing Arts materials including classical to modern philosophy and theory of performing arts, production, set design, musicals, and plays.
The Performing Arts Collection is in the basement of the Giovale Library. It can be searched in the catalog or Griffinsearch by selecting Performing Arts Collection under location.
Citing Sources
Citation Resources
Properly citing your sources shows that you’ve done research to become knowledgeable about your topic and helps you avoid plagiarism. Explore citation resources to learn how to correctly cite sources based on style.
Need help with your research?
Get in touch with:
Robyn Ward
Liaison Librarian for Theatre
Librarians are happy to answer questions via email, phone, or in-person.
Contact Robyn with a question or to schedule a research help appointment.
Faculty: Contact Robyn to suggest edits to this research guide.