Finding Articles - TD 311C - Performance as Public Practice - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

What is a database?

You may hear the term "library database" a lot, but what exactly does this mean? This video from RMIT University in Australia explains the term and how you can use databases for research.

Transcript available through YouTube.

Recommended Databases

International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text
1982 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains full text for more than 100 journal titles and citations for more than 60,000 journal articles, books, book articles and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance in 126 countries. Includes all of the content available in the 14 volume print International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance, published by the Theatre Research Data Center (TRDC) at Brooklyn College.
Project MUSE
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Journals: Updated as issues are published. Project MUSE is a leading provider of humanities and social science content for the scholarly community, with complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from leading university presses and scholarly societies.
Books: Selected titles from university presses and scholarly societies. All content from the print edition of the book is included in the digital edition. There are no DRM restrictions.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
JSTOR
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
1967 - present. 5 users.
Updated monthly. Produced by the RILM International Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center, this database is an international bibliography on music and related disciplines with citations to books, articles, videos, bibliographies, ethnographic recordings, dissertations, e-publications, films, catalogues, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, Festschriften, conference proceedings, reviews, recording notes, and pedagogical manuals if they are of scholarly interest. Indexes and abstracts over 500 scholarly journals and contains records in over 100 languages (titles and abstracts are in English). Print version also available.
Web of Science
1900 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
ERIC: Education Resources Information Center
1966 (selected full text from 1993) - present. Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Provides a digital library of education-related resources. Contains over 1.1 million citations covering research documents, journal articles, technical reports, program descriptions and evaluations, and curricular materials in the field of education.

Also includes more than 107,000 full text non-journal documents indexed by the ERIC database. Approximately one-half of the entries in the ERIC database are to ERIC documents. Microfiche copies of ERIC documents, including those prior to 1996, are in the Collections Deposit Library (CDL) Microforms Collection at MCFICHE 4913.
Academic Search Complete
1865 - present. Unlimited users.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints
1980 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Provides full text access to differing points of view on current social issues. Brings together viewpoint articles, contextual topic overviews, government and organizational statistics, biographies of social activists, court cases, profiles of government agencies and special interest groups, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as links to more than 1,800 reviewed and subject-indexed web sites.

Newspaper Articles and Reviews

Nexis Uni
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Proquest Databases
Coverage varies. Unlimited.
Landing page for all Proquest databases with the exception of the History Vault.
Factiva
Dates of coverage vary. 9 users.
Updated daily. A global information resource, providing full-text access to top national and international newspapers (including full text of the Wall Street Journal), newswires, business journals, market research reports, analysts reports and web sites. Contains over 8000 publications with content from 118 countries in 22 languages.
This database was formerly called Dow Jones Interactive.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a username and password prompt will probably be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.
Los Angeles Times (Historical)
1881 - 2001. Unlimited users.
Updated annually. Provides comprehensive coverage for Southern California's largest daily newspaper. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1881. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
New York Times (Historical)
1851 - 2018. Unlimited users.
Updated annually. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1851. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.
New York Times (Recent)
2008 - 3 months ago. Unlimited users.
Full-page images of The New York Times. Users can search PDF images of every part of every page, including full-text news articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more, with keyword highlighting. Coverage begins in 2008 and goes up through the most recent issue, with a 90-day embargo.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.

Reference and Background Databases

Theatre in Context Collection
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly (until completed). A comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. Includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to more than 30,000 plays (many never published previously), over 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, nearly 22,000 productions and 2,500 production companies. It also includes over 40,000 pages of reference sources in electronic format, including Annals of the New York Stage, and the American Theatre Companies series. Thousands of posters, playbills, and photographs are also included, as well as links to plays and related Web sites.
Gale eBooks
Most current edition. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Who's Who
1985 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Provides comprehensive profiles on 1.2 million (compiled from over 20 Marquis Who's Who print titles) of the most accomplished individuals from all fields including: government, business, science and technology, the arts, entertainment, and sports. Includes both current and historical persons from around the world. Comprehensive biographical coverage including the following data elements: birth information, family, education and degree, career history, creative works, awards, military history, achievements, current memberships, interests/hobbies, and contact information. Users can search by name or can search for people based on attributes such as nationality, occupation, gender, birth year and birth place.
Historical Abstracts
1955 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains citations and abstracts of worldwide literature (excluding the United States and Canada) from approximately 2,100 journals and (since 1980) books and dissertations on political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural and intellectual history and related areas of the social sciences and humanities. Covers history dating from 1450 to the present. The database corresponds to the print Historical Abstracts, which was produced by ABC-CLIO.
Internet Broadway Database
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. The official database for Broadway theatre information. Provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today. Details include pertinent people involved as well as interesting facts and production statistics. Get a list of every production of Hamlet on Broadway or a list of your favorite actor's credits. Find out what played at a particular theatre or what shows opened in a specified Broadway season.

Google Scholar

Use the power of Google's search algorithm for scholarly content.

Go through this library link so that your search results include the FindIt@UT button, which will provide you with the article PDFs through our library subscriptions.