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• Contents of This Guide
  
• Starting Your Research
• Finding Books
• Finding Articles

Theater

This guide lists basic resources for doing research in theater. For further assistance, contact Ed Teague, liaison for Theater Arts.

Starting Your Research

Dictionaries and encyclopedias can be good starting places for research. The information they provide ranges from basic facts and figures to scholarly articles. These reference works can assist in refining the scope of a paper or topic. Representative titles are listed below. Click on print titles (with call numbers) to identify location and availability.

• Performing Arts, Oxford Reference Online. [electronic resource]
  Includes Full-text, searchable versions of the Oxford Companion to American Theatre, Oxford Dictionary of Dance, International Encyclopedia of Dance, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford Companion to Music, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, Who's Who in Opera, Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Concise Oxford Companion to Theatre

Finding books

• UO Library Catalog
Find books and other cataloged materials owned by the UO Libraries through keyword, subject, title, and author searching in this database.
• Summit
Summit is the catalog of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, a consortium of regional libraries whose members include UO, Oregon State University, Portland State University, and others.
• WorldCat.
This database records library holdings from around the world.

Finding articles

Use an index to find articles in journals, newspapers, or magazines. Most key indexes are available as databases. Once you have retrieved an article citation, you'll need to verify that UO has the journal that holds the article. You can do this by searching the UO Catalog (below) or by clicking the FindText button which appears along with citations.

• International Bibliography of Theatre. REF KNIGHT Z 6935 .I53
Issued annually beginning in 1983, this is without a doubt the premier index for theatrical journals, and truly international in coverage. It also covers most drama journals, and includes references to books.
• MLA International Bibliography
An outstanding index to articles about drama and theater. The indexing to the online version starts in 1963; the indexing in the print version starts in 1953. This index does not cover technical theater topics, nor does it include reviews of productions (although it does index articles discussing problems in the production of a play).
• Academic Search Premier
An interdisciplinary journal index. Full-text of over 1,250 journals is available from 1990 to the present. In addition, indexing and abstracts are provided for nearly 2,880 journals from 1984 to the present.