ENGLISH AND DRAMA - DATABASES

Databases are excellent sources of good quality information. Below are a range of databases relevant to English and Drama.

• Academic Video Online – a comprehensive video subscription that includes over 70,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including literature, theatre, womens studies, LGBT studies, film, social theory, anthropology, health, history, music and more. 
• 19th Century Collections Online: British theatre, music and literature: a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the long 19th century, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. [Senate House Library]
• Academic Search Complete: A multidisciplinary database which provides full-text coverage from over 4,450 scholarly publications, more than 3,500 of them peer-reviewed. [Senate House Library]
• African Diaspora Archive: Essential for understanding Black history and culture, African Diaspora, 1860-Present allows scholars to discover the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera. Coverage: 1860-Present
• American Periodicals Series: This database contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.

• The Art Newspaper is a monthly print publication based in London and New York, covering news of the visual arts as they are affected by international politics and economics, developments in law, tax, the art market, the environment and official cultural policy. See Username and password detail.
• Box of Broadcasts (BOB): Innovative shared online off-air TV and radio recording service for UK higher and further education institutions. Choose and record any broadcast programme from 60+ TV and radio channels, schedule recordings in advance, edit programmes into clips, create playlists, embed clips into VLEs, share what you are watching with others and search a growing archive of material. Discover more about BoB National features by viewing their Video Tutorials
• Digital Theatre Plus – a resource that offers full-length filmed stage performances of classic and modern plays, along with interviews and workshops with playwrights, directors, designers, actors, musicians.
• Drama Online: An online digital library of playtexts, audio plays and video from theatre publishers and companies offering a multimedia experience of theatre. To access content - go to Log in, then Shibboleth Login and scroll down and click on Queen Mary University of London. 
• East London Theatre Archive: A database of theatre ephemera provided by the V & A Theatre Collections, East London theatres and UEL archives. The collection ranges from 1827 to the present day, and includes playbills and programmes, press-cuttings and photographs. There are themed essays to contextualise the material and maps showing theatre locations.
• Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive Collection 3: Film and Television Archive: An archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to the 21st century. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theatre are included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Issues have been scanned in high-resolution colour, with granular indexing of articles, covers, ads and reviews. Coverage: 1907 – 2015.
• Gale Primary Sources and Digital Scholar Lab:  is a humanities and social sciences digital primary sources archive that allows you to use a single cross- search interface to access 500 years of world history in multiple collections. Platform that combines access to a wide range of primary sources - Daily Mail Historical Archive, Financial Times Historical Archive, International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, Chatham House Online Archives, The Economist Historical Archive and more - with the Digital Scholar Lab which equips students and scholars with text and data mining resources, visualization tools, and methodology suggestions. Tutorials and Support
• Guardian and Observer Archive: This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time. Coverage: 1791 – 2003.
• Historical Texts: Brings together three historically significant collections for the first time: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collection.
• JSTOR: Provides access to the full text of many core academic journals, books and primary sources on the arts, humanities and social sciences. Note: Senate House Library has additional JSTOR collections.
• Literature Online (LION): A collection of literature in English, comprising poetry from 600 to the present, drama from 1280 to 1915 and prose from 1500 to 1900. It currently includes more than 175,000 individual works. The Literature Online English Corpus does not include American literature.
• Mass Observation Online: Makes available the complete archives of the pioneering social research organisation Mass Observation. There are original manuscript and typescript papers, printed publications and photographs, and interactive features.
• MediaPlus: Provides a single point of access to three major multimedia archives. It enables cross-searching and exploration of TV news, documentary films, still images and classical music from the following archives: Digital Images for Education, NewsFilm Online and Film & Sound Online.
• MLA International Bibliography: Provides a subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore and linguistics. [Senate House Library]
• Nexis UK: Access to regional, national and global newspaper and the BBC monitoring service. Video Tutorials
• Oxford Art Online: Search across Grove Art Online and Oxford art reference in one location (which includes access to the Dictionary of Art). Oxford Art Online also includes access to Oxford companion to Western art, Encyclopedia of aesthetics, Concise Oxford dictionary of art terms. [Senate House Library]
• Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature – a reference tool that aims to map the world's entire landscape of literary expressions and criticism, bringing together the various fields and approaches that make up literature in its broadest sense.
• The Oxford English Dictionary: Features 600,000 words, 3 million quotations, and over 1000 years of English.
• Oxford Reference: An online resource that brings together 2 million digitised entries from across Oxford’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. Best for checking a fact or finding key information on a person, concept or term.
• Performing Arts Periodicals Database: provides indexing and abstracts for more than 395 international periodicals, plus full text for more than 160 of the indexed journals. Covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more. [Senate House Library]
• Project MUSE: Provides full-text access to over 300 journals in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: Search for dissertations and theses from across the world. [Senate House Library]
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature: Indexes articles, books, catalogues, dissertations and other publications from the 1830s to the present. [Senate House Library]
• SAGE Research Methods: A database dedicated to research methods across a range of subject areas. SAGE Research Methods supports research at all levels by providing material to guide users through every step of the research process, from writing a research question, conducting a literature review, choosing the best research methods, analysing data, to writing up results and thinking about publication.
• Scopus: Multi-disciplinary database containing the citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. This database lists the number of times a work has been cited in other works and provides direct links to the abstracts of citing works. Access to full-text subscription content where available at Queen Mary Library via "Library - check full text" button. Video Tutorial
• Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 which includes the Sunday edition - allows you to search historical data on any number of topics, and offers insight into domestic and international affairs and culture over a timespan of almost 150 years.  Link to tutorials and training.
• The Times Digital Archive: 1785-2011 (and rolling) provides access to a library of back issues of the newspaper online plus searchable images from the microfilm collection of The Times.
• The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive: 1902-2014 offers insight, criticism, and commentary on literature and the arts from over a century. 
• Web of Science: Multi-disciplinary database containing the citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. This database lists the number of times a work has been cited in other works and provides direct links to the abstracts of citing works. Access to full-text subscription content where available at Queen Mary Library via "Library - check full text" button. Video Tutorial

The databases listed above are only a small part of the database collections at Queen Mary and Senate House Libraries. You can find the full list of databases available at Queen Mary via the Library's A-Z List of Databases. If the topic you are studying crosses a number of different subject areas, you may find it helpful to check the other Library  pages for useful resources, contacts and information.