LibGuides: ENGL 3998: Late-Victorian and Modern Drama: Getting Started

Reference sources

Theatre in Context Collection
The collection includes 40,000 pages of monumental reference works, encyclopedias, images, flyers, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks, and other resources.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
This encyclopedia provides authoritative and up-to-date information about theatre and performance from ancient Greek theatre to the latest developments in London, Paris, New York, and around the globe. In addition to performances in playhouses, it covers dance, opera, radio, film, television, and popular performance, including carnivals, circus, and public executions. Entries range from short definitions of terms to lengthy considerations of genres and movements, such as feminism and psychoanalytic criticism. Entries on cities and regions place performance in its local social and political context. Searches can be done by keyword or through a browsable A-Z list. Written in accessible language.
Oxford English dictionary online (OED)
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from Dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals.

Boolean Operators and Modifiers

Searching in Academic Databases using Boolean Operators and Modifiers

Academic databases work most effectively when using AND, OR, and NOT or including "quotation marks" or asterisks * in your searching. The videos below do a wonderful job unpacking how these tools work.

Catalog search tips:

If you know exactly what book (journal, video, etc.) you are looking for, you can search by Title, Author, ISBN, etc.
To find items about a specific topic, first try a keyword search in All Fields.
Use "quotation marks" to search for an exact phrase: "The Thief and the Dogs".
Use * for truncation (to find variant spellings and endings of a word): parent* will find parent, parents, parental, parenthood, etc.; wom*n will find woman, women, womyn, etc.
For more complex search, use AND and OR (note that AND and OR must be in ALL CAPS for this to work correctly in CLIO):
- AND finds records which have ALL the search terms you entered.
- OR finds records which have one of the search terms you entered, as well as records which have more than one of the terms. OR finds MORE.
- For more help with using AND and OR, check our guide to advanced/Boolean keyword searching.
Use parentheses ( ) to group terms: Frankenstein* AND (parent* OR father*)

ENGL 3998: Late-Victorian and Modern Drama

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Reference sources

Boolean Operators and Modifiers

Searching in Academic Databases using Boolean Operators and Modifiers

Slides