ENTH 3139: Modern American Drama and Performance

CLIO Catalog

CLIO is the online catalog to Columbia University Libraries (including Barnard), but excluding Teacher's College and the Law Library who maintain their own catalogs. CLIO contains over 7 million records for books, online resources, journals & newspapers, conference proceedings, sound recordings & scores, videos, archival collections & oral history transcripts, online databases, maps & images, and more!

CLIO Search Tips:

• Use the Catalog Search to find books, journal and newspaper titles, media materials, musical scores, archival collections and databases (but not articles within databases). You can also find maps and atlases.
• Article Search allows you to search articles indexed in all of Columbia's databases
• Search for specific e-journal titles using the E-journal Title search
• Use the link to Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan when the book or media item is checked out.

About

The NYPL Library for the Performing Arts houses one of the most extensive research collections in theatre, film, dance, music, and recorded sound.

The Library is open for browsing of its circulating collections. To request access to special collections material, users will need to create a special collections account. It is encouraged that patrons to make an appointment with the relevant division.

The Library for the Performing Arts is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza (entrance at 111 Amsterdam between 64th and 65th) - between the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Center Theater.

Divisions

• Billy Rose Theatre Division: offers walk-in access to their general research collections. Researchers may access  special collections by emailing theatre@nypl.org or by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts.

• Jerome Robbins Dance Division: At this time they are not offering walk-in access to their research collections, but researchers can still access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For further inquiries you can contact dance@nypl.org.

• Music Division: At this time, the Music Division is not offering walk-in access to our research collections, but researchers can still access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For more information you can email music@nypl.org.

• Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound: At this time, they are not offering walk-in access to their research collections, but researchers can access them by booking a virtual consultation with one of our librarians, who will make an appointment for you to visit the Library for the Performing Arts. For more information you can email recordedsound@nypl.org. 

• Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT): offers walk-in access to their research collections, but for faster access we encourage researchers to make an appointment. For an appointment, please call (212) 870-1642 or email toft@nypl.org.

You can find the general regulations for researchers here. 

NYPL Performing Arts Library: Digital Collection

Known Item Searching

• If you know exactly what book (journal, video, etc.) you are looking for, you can search by
  • Title (use quotation marks to search a title as a phrase)
  • Author
  • ISBN (the unique number for books)
  • ISSN (the unique number for periodicals)

Keyword Searching

• To find items about a specific topic, first try a keyword search in All Fields.
  • Use "quotation marks" to search for an exact phrase: "black lives matter" 
  • Use ? for wildcard, and * for truncation to find variant spellings and endings of a word:
    • Example wom?n will find woman, women, womyn
    • ethnicit* will find ethnicity, ethnicities, etc.
  • For more complex search, use AND and OR:
    • 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 out our guide to boolean logic. 
  • Use parentheses to group terms:  (wom?n OR gender) AND (#blacklivesmatter OR "black lives matter") 

Using Subject Headings

• If you find a book that's relevant, look at its subject headings in CLIO and click through to find more related works.
• Look for subheadings that indicate historical content or critical interpretations:
  • topics/institutions - “sociological aspects”
  • places (countries, cities, etc.) and groups of people/communities - “social conditions”
  • effect of item, activity, discipline, etc. on society - “social aspects”