Databases A-Z
The Library provides access to an extensive range of databases
These include online collections of e-books, e-journals, digital manuscripts and images, as well as streaming on demand film, television, and tech skills tutorials.
These resources are for educational use only and must not be altered or adapted in any way.
* Database included in library search
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The 1.2 million periodical pages of Series 1 of this collection cover 'New Readership':
- Women & children
- Sports & leisure
- Humour & satire
These archives contain digitised 16th to 19th century British newspapers from the British Library's collections.
Full runs of 48 newspapers are covered, including:
- Morning Chronicle
- The Examiner and Illustrated Police News
- Pall Mall Gazette
- Northern Echo
- Western Mail
- Newcastle Courant
- Bristol Mercury
A highlight is the 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspaper Collection containing newspapers and news pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757 - 1817), representing the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media.
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a-n provides resources for artists, students, tutors and arts professionals including news, features, toolkits, case studies, practical guides and advice. a-n is the largest artists' membership organisation in the UK.
Academic Search Complete offers the full text of over 8,800 journals in all academic subjects. The contents of another 18,000 journals are indexed and abstracted. Associated Press video content from the 1970s to the present day is also included.
*If an article is not in full text, you can check the journals A-Z to find out whether it is held on another service or in print format. If it's not, you can request an Interlibrary loan.
The American Chemical Society archive contains the backfiles of 23 journals up to 1995, providing access to over 460,000 articles, including those by over 180 Nobel prize winners.bb
Examples of journals included are:
- Analytical Chemistry, 1929-1995
- Biochemistry, 1962-1995
- Environmental Science & Technology, 1967-1995
- Inorganic Chemistry, 1962-1995
- Journal of Natural Products, 1979-1995
- Macromolecules, 1968-1995
Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts offers access to over 170 illustrated art and design ebooks which combine visual inspiration with practical advice on idea generation, research techniques, portfolio development and more.
All the main visual arts disciplines are represented, including: design, illustration, photography, film, architecture, interiors, marketing, fashion and textiles
A collection of more than 200 key titles focusing on studio design and professional practice, including 15,000 images, and content on sustainability and digital design.
- Archives Unbound
- Art & Architecture Archive Collection 1
- Artforum
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States
- British Library Sounds
- Chatham House Online Archive
- Defining Gender, 1450-1910
- Eighteenth Century Journals I, II, III, IV and V (1685 - 1835)
- Empire Online
- The First World War
- Global Commodities
- Eighteenth Century Drama
- Literary Manuscripts (Leeds)
- Literary Print Culture
- Macmillan Cabinet Papers 1957-1963
- Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965
- Mass Observation Online
- Migration to New Worlds
- The Nixon Years, 1969-1974
- Perdita Manuscripts
- Periodicals Archive Online
- The Rolling Stone Archive
- Royal College of Physicians digital archive, Part 1: 1101-1862
- Shakespeare in Performance
- Slavery Abolition & Social Justice
- Victorian Popular Culture
- Video Gaming: Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive Collection 5
- Vogue Archive
For a description of each service above, see its separate entry in the main A-Z list.
Contains topically-focused digital collections of historical documents. Collections in Archives Unbound cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Collections are chosen for Archives Unbound based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.
Full text archive of 27 magazines comprising key research material in the fields of art and architecture, from the late 1800s to the early 2000s.
Subjects covered include fine arts, decorative arts, interior design, industrial design, architecture and photography.
This collection includes full text plus specialist indexes and abstracts
- Arts and Humanities Full Text features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies
- ARTbibliographies Modern, a specialist bibliography available for the study of modern and contemporary art, covering all art forms, including fine art, digital art, crafts, design and photography
- Design and Applied Arts Index covers all aspects of design and crafts from 1973 to the present, from textiles and ceramics to vehicle design, advertising and sustainability
- International Bibliography of Art covers scholarship on Western art history
The Artforum archive provides access to issues of the leading magazine for coverage of international contemporary art from its launch in 1962 to 2020. It contains features, reviews and interviews relating to artists, exhibitions and publications, as well as architecture, film, fashion, photography and music.
More recent issues can be found via the Journals A-Z.
This database offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of over 300 peer-selected publications.
Coverage includes:
- Latin American, Canadian, Asian and non-Western art
- New artists
- Contemporary art
- Exhibition reviews
- Feminist criticism.
A comprehensive guide to art galleries, auction houses, art fairs and agents from multiple national and historical contexts containing thousands of peer reviewed articles covering Europe and North America from 1900 to the present day.
Arts professional is a news and information service for art sector professionals. It also provides events guides, weekly jobs bulletins and professional development updates.
Artstor supports study in art, architecture, humanities and across disciplines with 300 collections composed of over 2.5 million curated images from outstanding museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.
The images have been rights-cleared for use in education and research and come with high-quality metadata from the collection catalogers, curators, institutions, and artists themselves.
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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project contains digital facsimiles of significant works by the Irish novelist, playwright and poet Samuel Beckett.
The archive is organised into research modules, each of which contains all extant manuscripts pertaining to an individual text, now preserved in different holding libraries around the world.
A curated selection of primary sources focused on U.S. Black history, covering the period 1790-2000
Bloomsbury Academic began as an open access book publisher in 2009 and ever since has committed itself to publishing the best scholarship in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Bloomsbury Academic's Open Access collection has over 200 of the highest quality titles available online for free, covering subjects such as Anthropology, Film & Media Studies, Politics and & International Relations, History and Education.
BoB is the British Universities Film & Video Council's on-demand TV and radio service for education. This service allows students and staff to view, record, create clips and share broadcast programmes from over 60 TV and radio channels. BoB video tutorials
Due to copyright restrictions, you need to be physically located in the United Kingdom to use BoB.
Bridgeman Education provides access to around 250,000 images covering the visual culture from prehistory to the present day from all over the world. All aspects of art are included - fine art, photography, sculpture, architecture, archaeology, etc. There is detailed information given with each image and they are free to use for educational purposes.
*Bridgeman's resources must be used for educational purposes only and, if you use any image in your work, you must acknowledge the source as you would any other reference.
This service from EBSCO provides access to three databases which can be searched singly or all together:
- British Education Index: this gives access to bibliographic references from some 350 British and selected European English-language journals since 1975
- ERIC: the Educational Resources and Information Center of the US Department of Education indexes over 770 journals and currently contains over 750,000 records from 1966 on
- Child Development & Adolescent Studies: from 1927
- Education Abstracts: from 1983
- Educational Administration Abstracts: from the 1960s to the present
*This database does not provide full text though many entries include abstracts. You will need to check the Library catalogue and/or the journals web pages to find out whether a particular book or journal is held. If not, you may want to apply via interlibrary loans for a copy.
British Library Sounds provides access to recordings of oral histories, interviews with artists and designers, unpublished ethnographic material, classical, jazz and popular music recordings and environmental sounds.
*These resources should be used for teaching, learning and research purposes only. Guidance is available from the British Library.
**Some resources which were accessible on BL Sounds' old website have been decommissioned in early 2023. For an update of their status please see the page: Decommissioned British Library Content.
Provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images.
Use your BSU username and password to login.
Broadcast is a resource for the TV & Media industry which provides up-to-the minute industry news, expert analysis and commentary, insider industry information and business critical data.
Access to the Broadcast magazine and database does not require signing up. Staff and students can register to receive email newsletters, access to events and app using their Bath Spa email address on the Broadcast registration webpage. You are advised that this will be processed by Broadcast in accordance with their Privacy Policy.
The Burney Newspaper Collection contains newspapers and news pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757 - 1817). They represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media.
Business Source Ultimate offers the full text of over 5,500 of the most important scholarly business journals, as well as articles and indexing and abstracts for over 7,000 more.
Thousands of case studies, market research reports and company profiles are also included.
*For those articles not provided in full text, you will need to check the Journals A-Z to find out whether it is held on another service or in print format. If not, you may want to apply via interlibrary loans for a copy.
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This online archive provides access to thousands of eBooks as well as the full text of over 50 Cambridge University Press journal titles.
The Chatham House Online Archive (CHOA) contains Chatham House’s publications and archive from 1920 to 2008. The collection includes over half a million pages of research and analysis from the world-leading centre for policy and research, subject-indexed and fully searchable.
Construction Information Service (CIS) delivers key technical information for construction projects. It includes fundamental industry information and legislation from over 400 national organisations including the British Standards Institute, the Chartered Institute of Building and the Institution of Structural Engineers.
Due to copyright restrictions, you need to be physically located in the United Kingdom to use CIS.
There are additional restrictions on how British Standards content can be used, please contact the Library (digitalcollections@bathspa.ac.uk) for details.
This site will help you with guidance on referencing within your academic work.
For any queries about referencing please email: wlc@bathspa.ac.uk.
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The Daily Mail has been at the heart of British journalism since 1896, regularly changing the course of government policy and setting the national debate. It currently boasts a circulation of over 2 million, and its website is the most visited news site in the world.
More than 100 years of this major UK national newspaper can be viewed in full digital facsimile form, with copious advertisements, news stories and images that capture 20th and 21st century culture and society.
Dance in Video contains dance productions and documentaries from some of the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century.
Selections cover:
- Ballet
- Tap
- Jazz
- Contemporary
- Experimental
- Improvisational dance
Defining Gender provides access to a collection of original documents relating to gender studies from libraries and archives worldwide.
Amongst other documents, the collection includes:
- letters and diaries
- conduct and advice literature
- poetry
- pamphlets, periodicals and manuscript journals
Bloomsbury Design Library offers comprehensive global coverage of the history, theory and practice of crafts and design, from prehistoric times to the present day, including over 4,000 object images from worldwide design museums.
Digimap is an online map and data delivery service offering a number of data collections, including Ordnance Survey, historical, geological and spatial data.
(Staff and students will need to authenticate using your BSU log-in, and then register individually to accept the terms and conditions for all 13 collections we have access to.)
Compiled by Oxford University Press, the site contains entries on over 50,000 people who shaped history, society and culture from the earliest times to those who died in 2000, including over 10,000 portrait illustrations.
Digital Theatre Plus offers high-definition films of acclaimed British theatre productions. It provides a unique in depth insight into practice and the profession of theatre-making.
Please note: you will need to use the latest version of the Google Chrome browser in order to watch content.
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Drama Online offers full text editions of over 3,500 plays, from the Greeks to the present, but also ground-breaking British plays, and highly contemporary new drama with a focus on women’s drama, international drama, drama in translation, and drama by black and Asian writers.
The content comes from the pre-eminent theatre lists and imprints of Methuen Drama, the Arden Shakespeare and Faber and Faber, providing contextual and critical background through 450 academic books, critical guides, production photos, annotations and practical guides. Also available is an advanced play finder tool.
The National Theatre Collections 1 and 2 draw on 10 years of NT live broadcasts plus high-quality archive recordings to offer 50 filmed performances.
Plays
Context & Criticism books
Productions recorded live on stage
The Drum provides insights, guidance, inspiration and solutions for the marketing and media industries.
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This site is a collection of about 100,000 titles taken from the following catalogues and sources:
- Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640);
- Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700);
- Thomason Tracts (1640-1661);
- Early English Books Tract Supplement.
It comprises digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Wales and British North America and elsewhere from 1473 to 1700. EEBO is available though JISC Historical Texts.
Early European Books provides access to full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access books printed in Europe before 1701. It is an excellent complement to Early English Books Online.
Each item includes images of:
- bindings
- edges
- endpapers
- blank pages
- loose inserts
This provides information about the physical characteristics and history of the original artefact.
EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) allows you to search the majority of the Library's digital resources and other scholarly content. EDS has advanced search capabilities that allow you to, for example, search within the full text of search results, or widen a search to include abstracts only.
Available through EBSCOhost, this service offers the full text of some 750 journals in education and related areas, about 100 books in full text and numerous conference papers. In addition, the contents tables of 1,500 journals are indexed, many including abstracts.
This bundle from EBSCO comprises the following services:
- British Education Index: compiled by the University of Leeds, this gives access to bibliographic references from some 350 British and selected European English-language journals since 1976;
- ERIC: the Educational Resources and Information Center of the US Department of Education indexes over 770 journals and ERIC currently contains over 750,000 records from 1966 onwards, making it the largest educational database in the world.
- Educational Administration Abstracts: This research database includes more than 199,000 bibliographic records covering areas related to educational administration, including educational leadership, educational management, educational research and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
- Education Abstracts: Providing indexing and abstracts for more than 680 periodicals, Education Abstracts features content on a wide array of subject areas including adult education, comparative education, government funding, higher education, school administration, teacher evaluation.
- Child Development & Adolescent Studies: contains current and historical literature related to growth and development of children through the age of 21. This includes book reviews and abstracts from hundreds of journals and a bibliography of thousands of technical reports, books, book chapters, theses and dissertations covering biomedical and social sciences worldwide are indexed in this database.
This is a collection of about 135,000 eighteenth century printed books with over 26 million scanned pages.
Each title has a full citation record from the English Short Title Catalogue and is fully searchable, including the full text. ECCO is available through JISC Historical Texts.
This collection of primary source material provides students and scholars with access to the Larpent Collection of over 2,500 plays from California's Huntington Library. John Larpent was the Lord Chamberlain’s Inspector of Plays, with responsibility for censoring plays for the English stage.
Larpent preserved the original submissions of operas and plays – many of which were never staged or published – in his collection, which has been digitised in full colour.
The Eighteenth Century Journals collections contain newspapers and journals, from 1685 to 1835, providing an invaluable resource for researching the century. The journals are sourced from such reputable libraries as the Bodleian in Oxford, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Chetham's Library, Manchester, Birmingham Central Library and the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses. Use it to find full and download text versions free of charge.
Additional Information
If the British Library haven't digitised the one you want yet, they will try and obtain an electronic copy or direct you to where you can get a paper copy. Where electronic copies have to be made, you may have to pay a fee (you will be alerted to this when you confirm your order).
EThOS is the first port-of-call when looking for a thesis. However, where electronic copies are not available, we may still be able to borrow a paper copy on your behalf - please forward to us a copy of your communication with EThOS.
This is a collection of original documents relating to Empire studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. They include exploration journals, periodicals, diaries, slave papers, maps and many others.
Passport from Euromonitor provides data and insight on industries, economies and consumers worldwide, helping our clients analyse market context and identify future trends.
***We recommend using the Google Chrome browser to access Euromonitor***
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Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases is designed to help students develop essential business skills and presents real-world fashion business cases, and tackles important issues such as sustainability, technology, ethics, and leadership.
Fashion Central is a hub for interdisciplinary research in fashion and dress, and provides access to major reference works, exclusive articles, scholarly eBooks, case studies, biographies, lesson plans, bibliographic guides, textbooks, runway and backstage photos from fashion shows, and tens of thousands of images from museums around the world.
The collections below provide structured access to this content:
Videos of worldwide fashion shows, designer profiles and interviews ranging from the mid 1980s to 2015.
Available through EBSCOhost, this service offers the full text of some 100 journals and 100 books. In addition, the contents of another 250 journals are indexed, many including abstracts.
FBIS provides an invaluable archive of news reports from the twentieth century for the United States, China, the Middle East, Latin America, the Soviet Union and more.
Content includes news articles translated into English from the original language, summaries, highlights and reviews written by FBIS staff, as well as transcripts of speeches and interviews.
Searches for articles can be limited by country, and articles on particular historical events can be explored, for example the 1973 - 1974 OPEC oil embargo, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.
The First World War portal showcases a wealth of primary source material for the study of the Great War. Bath Spa has subscriptions to the Propaganda and Recruitment and Visual Perspectives and Narratives collections.
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Contains full-text access to over 8,000 journal titles containing peer-reviewed full-text scholarly content in both PDF and HTML, across the academic disciplines.
Explore the world's companies through expert analysis such as SWOT analyses, financial statements, case studies and articles from academic journals, trade magazines, news outlets and more.
Business Insights gives you access to over 4,000 full-text publications including newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and peer-reviewed academic journals.
LitFinder
Provides access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 150,000 full-text poems and 800,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays.
Literature Criticism Online
Includes centuries of scholarly, popular and literary commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals. The online format matches the exact look and feel of the print originals
Literature Resource Centre
Contains biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world
Gale OneFile: News provides access to full-text newspapers and allows users to search articles instantly by title, headline, date, newspaper section, or other fields. The database offers a one-stop source for current news and searchable archives.
Gale eBooks is a database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is the first comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world, make this the most complete body of work focused on world music
Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange provides a vast range of visual, manuscript and printed materials sourced from over twenty key libraries and more than a dozen companies and trade organisations around the world.
These original sources will help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.
Grove Art Online is the foremost scholarly art encyclopedia, covering both Western and non-Western art. First published as the landmark 34-volume Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, the content of Grove Art encompasses all aspects of visual culture.
Other key features of Grove Art Online include:
- over 45,000 signed articles,
- over 5,000 art images and line drawings, and
- over 21,000 biographies.
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
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The Harper’s Bazaar Archive includes the complete run of U.S. Harper’s Bazaar, from 1867 to the present, fully indexed and searchable. This full color collection of approximately 350,000 pages provides a powerful lens into American and international popular culture from the mid-19th century forward, facilitating academic research in wide-ranging fields such as:
- women’s studies,
- fashion, marketing,
- advertising, material culture,
- design, and more.
A chronicle of some of the most influential work from world-renowned designers, models, photographers, stylists, and illustrators of the mid-nineteenth century forward, the Harper’s Bazaar Archive captures this record of popular culture, facilitating searching, digital humanities projects, and multidisciplinary inquiries.
This site provides access to the full text of thousands of documents from 1688 to 2003/4, covering over 300 years of policy making, investigation, correspondence and research - a unique historical record of the times.
The documents include debates, proceedings, bills, House papers, Command papers, reports of Commissioners and Committees.
Historical Texts brings together three historically significant collections for the first time:
- Early English Books Online (EEBO)
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
- British Library 19th Century collection.
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When it began in 1842 the Illustrated London News became the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper, sparking a revolution in journalism and news reporting. The publication presents a vivid picture of British and world events - wars, disasters, royalty, social affairs, the arts and science: in fact, its first issue covered the war in Afghanistan as well as the latest fashions from Paris!
This archive contains over 260,000 full colour pages, fully searchable and browsable, and provides unprecedented access to the entire run of this unique historical record.
For a description of each service above, see its separate entry in the main A-Z list.
Available through EBSCOhost, this service offers the full text of some 100 journals in theatre and the performing arts plus about 100 books in full text.
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Historical Texts brings together three historically significant collections for the first time:
- Early English Books Online (EEBO)
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
- British Library 19th Century collection.
JISC Journal Archives enables simple and fast conceptual searching across more than 450 journals published by Brill, Institution of Civil Engineers, Institute of Physics, ProQuest, Oxford University Press and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory provides a comprehensive survey of ideas and theorists from
Plato to modern times, examining developments in other disciplines which have shaped theory and criticism.
Search Tips
Use * as a truncation symbol (e.g. child*). Use single quotation marks to indicate phrases (e.g. 'new historicism').
This collection provides access to thousands of items from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The collection was assembled by John de Monins Johnson (1882-1956), Printer to the University. It contains a high proportion of unique material, which has remained largely hidden to scholars and researchers. When the digitisation project is complete, there will be access to over 150,000 items in the following categories:
- 19th century entertainment
- the book trade
- popular prints
- crime, murders and executions
- advertising
JSTOR provides the full text of over 1,000 journals via a number of collections. Generally, the complete back run of the titles are held except for the most recent 3 to 5 years: new volumes are added each year so that there is always a 3 to 5 year gap.
JSTOR also contains millions of curated images from outstanding museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.
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Kanopy is a streaming service for educational institutions that provides access to over 18,000 films, including major blockbusters, documentaries and the Criterion collection.
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Law Trove provides full text access to 200 Oxford University Press (OUP) Law textbooks with simple navigation that allows you to search across the whole collection.
Lexis+ contains a range of full text legal resources, including All England Law Reports, Halsbury's Laws of England, Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, Atkins Court Forms and key UK journals.
Please note that any material printed or downloaded from Lexis should be kept for no more than 90 days, and material should not be uploaded to Lexis itself.
Due to copyright restrictions, you need to be physically located in the United Kingdom to use Lexis.
LinkedIn Learning is trusted by businesses, governments and over one million individuals worldwide to learn software, creative, design and business skills. New courses and videos are added every week.
Chronicling the transformative rise of radio and television and published weekly by the BBC for 70 years, The Listener was originally established to reproduce radio and TV broadcasts, but it regularly reviewed new books. Major contributors included E.M. Forster, George Orwell and Bertrand Russell and it provided an important platform for new writers and poets including W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin.
This collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century poetry contains facsimile images of 190 manuscripts held by the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
The manuscripts range from contemporary copies of poems by writers like Colvil, Dryden, Fairfax and Pope to popular tags and epitaphs. Many of the manuscripts are miscellanies and commonplace books which have never previously been indexed. They are also accompanied by interactive essays.
The Stationers’ Company Archive is one of the most important resources for understanding the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions and the history of bookbinding.
Explore extremely rare documents dating from 1554 to the 21st century in this invaluable resource of research material for historians and literary scholars.
Available through EBSCOhost, this service provides information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timelines.
Contents include:
- About 100,000 articles of literary criticism
- Over 35,000 plot summaries
- Over 250,000 author biographies
- 450 journals
- The full text of over 100,000 poems
- More than 50,000 short stories
- About 10,000 dramatic works, video and audio recordings
- Over 500 e-books.
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Provides access to images of 30,000 original documents from the Macmillan administration.
The images are linked to fully searchable indexes, including browsable Class Lists CAB 128, CAB 129, CAB 134 and PREM 11. Also includes the consolidated Annual Indexes to the Cabinet Papers of the period. There are five essays on the Macmillan Administration and lists of Ministers and Officials from 1957 to 1964.
Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 provides a unique insight into the American consumer boom of the mid-20th century through access to the market research reports and supporting documents of Ernest Dichter (the era’s foremost consumer analyst and market research pioneer).
The Archive of Mass Observation, a pioneering social research resource, provides access to around 115,000 digital images of material generated by mass observation between 1937 and 1949, with a few later additions from the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1937, some 500 volunteers were recruited from the general public to form “a national panel" who were asked to record the everyday concerns of their lives on the twelfth of each month, including dreams, hopes, and fears. The archive contains file reports, summaries and conclusions, books and topic collections, day surveys and diaries, photographs and maps.
This is an invaluable resource for sociologists, cultural historians and a wide range of other disciplines.
From departure to destination, discover the dreams and harsh realities for migrants to the New World and Australasia during the ‘century of immigration’. This captivating, multi-archive collection provides a wide-ranging and in depth look at the emigration of peoples from Great Britain, mainland Europe and Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Music Ally is an information service that provides students and academics access to essential information on the digital music business. This database contains searchable current news, in-depth country profiles, analysis, and digital marketing reports that are essential for keeping you up to date in the fast paced commercial music industry.
MusicID: Global music industry data, incorporating 5,452 different charts spanning 74 countries. Perpetually-updated, week-to-week information on iTunes downloads, Spotify and Apple Music streams. Track the worldwide top earning recordings of the 21st century to reveal the most successful artists, singles, and albums of the last twenty years.
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The National Theatre Collections 1 and 2 draw on 10 years of NT live broadcasts plus high-quality archive recordings to offer 50 filmed performances.
Naxos Music Library contains thousands of CDs from the Naxos and Marco Polo catalogues and other record labels. These can be accessed by composer, artist, genre, category and label or a more general search.
It also has related resources including analyses of selected works and an interactive music dictionary.
Naxos Jazz Music Library offers a wide range of jazz music, from jazz legends to contemporary jazz. Recordings of over 32,000 artists are represented
Access for 10 simultaneous users. Please use the log-out button at the top of the screen to end your session.
Naxos Spoken Word Library has thousands of audiobooks, plays, poetry and classic novels from medieval times to the 21st century, including content in French and German.
Access for 3 simultaneous users. Please use the log-out button at the top of the screen to end your session.
- Burney Newspaper Collection (1757-1815)
- Daily Mail Historical Archives
- FBIS
- Gale OneFile News
- The Guardian and The Observer archives, 1791 - 2003
- Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822 to 2006
- Times Digital Archive, 1785 to 2019
For a description of each service above, see its separate entry in the main A-Z list.
This collection provides complete FCO 7 and FCO 82 files for the entire period of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Top-level Anglo-American discussions and briefing papers dominate these papers. There is also a wealth of material on social conditions, domestic reforms, trade, culture and the environment.
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The Open Library of the Humanities provides access to over 27 open access, peer reviewed academic journals from across the Humanities, including classics, philosophy, theology, history, political theory, sociology, film and new media studies and digital humanities.
Oxford Bibliographies in Criminology is an online guide to the essential literature across the various subfields of criminology.
Each article, written and reviewed by top scholars in the field, is rich with citations and annotations, expert recommendations, and narrative pathways to the most important works for virtually all areas of criminology.
Compiled by Oxford University Press, the site contains entries on over 50,000 people who shaped history, society and culture from the earliest times to those who died in 2000, including over 10,000 portrait illustrations.
The Oxford English Dictionary is the world's leading authority on the development of the English language over the last millennium. It's an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history and pronunciation of over half a million words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international sources.
Oxford Handbooks Online (OHO) is one of the most successful strands of Oxford’s scholarly publishing, containing in-depth, high-level articles by scholars at the top of their field. Recent changes to the publishing program means that all Handbooks will be available online as well as in print. Monthly updates introduce articles ahead of print publication and additional, born-digital content ensures more current and authoritative coverage.
Bath Spa Library users now have access to Handbooks in the following subject areas:
The Oxford History of Western Music provides access to the acclaimed account of the evolution of Western classical music by Richard Taruskin. It includes over 500 images and 1,800 musical examples plus links to Oxford Music Online.
This online archive provides access to the full text of 157 Oxford University Press journals to 1995. Most journals start at Volume 1.
The Archive divides the journals into subject groups for easier searching:
- Humanities, 1829-1995
- Law, 1952-1995
- Life Sciences, 1848-1995
- Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 1848-1995
- Medicine, 1878-1995
- Social Sciences, 1902-1995.
Since the Archive only allows access to journals from 1995 and previous years, you may need to check the Library catalogue and/or Journals A-Z to find out whether a particular issue from 1996 onwards is held. If not, you may want to apply via interlibrary loans for a copy.
Oxford Music Online has over 52,000 articles, plus links to related materials, including sound archives and illustrations.
Oxford Music Online provides full text access to:
- Grove Music Online
- Encyclopedia of Popular Music
- Oxford Dictionary of Music
- Oxford Companion to Music.
Access also includes the New Grove Dictionary of Opera and the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) offer long-form overview articles written, peer-reviewed and edited by leading scholars. They aim to provide a knowledge base for major areas of research and enable a reliable understanding of different topics.
Bath Spa Library users now have access to Research Encyclopedias in the following subject areas:
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This collection of manuscripts from early modern women authors is the result of the Perdita Project at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. There are over 230 manuscripts reproduced here, all written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sourced from libraries all over the UK and USA.
PAO contains the backfiles of some 700 journals in the arts, social sciences and humanities, published between 1891 and 2000.
Highlights include:
- Art Journal, 1941-1995
- Comparative Drama, 1967-1995
- Current History, 1941-1995
- Current Musicology, 1965-1995
- Film and History, 1971-1995
- Geography, 1902-2000
- Journal of Popular Film and Television, 1972-1996
- Literary Review, 1957-1996
- New Statesman, 1913-2000
- Sight and Sound, 1932-1990
- Social Research, 1934-1995
- Spectator, 1828-2000
- Victorian Poetry, 1963-1995
This database covers classic and contemporary poems, short stories, and biographies and authoritative essays on topics like poetic forms, movements and techniques.
Content includes:
- over 700,000 poems
- 51,000 short stories
- 10,000 dramatic works
- 542 eBooks on poetry, drama and short stories
The period from 1950 to 1975 witnessed dramatic changes in society. There was the onset of Rock & Roll; the introduction of computers and credit cards; the boom of radio and television; and campaigns for black power, civil rights and women’s liberation.
By focusing on substantial collections of original archival material from key British and American libraries, this database provides primary sources that will enable students to examine these issues at first hand:
Project MUSE provides the full text of over 300 journals, with all graphs, charts and images.
The Library subscribes to the Humanities and Social Sciences Collections, which include journals in culture, film, history, literature, music, politics and religions. A title list is available for browsing.
PsycARTICLES®, from the American Psychological Association (APA), is a definitive source of full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. It contains more than 153,000 articles from nearly 80 journals published by the American Psychological Association (APA), its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychological Association and the Hogrefe Publishing Group. It includes all journal articles, book reviews, letters to the editor, and errata from each journal.
The American Psychological Association's PsycINFO® database is the comprehensive international bibliographic database of psychology. It contains citations and summaries of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations, and technical reports, all in the field of psychology and the psychological aspects of related disciplines, such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, etc. Journal coverage, spanning 1806 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,450 periodicals from more than 49 countries. Over 80,000 records are added annually through weekly updates. More than 36 million references in over 870,000 journal articles, books, and book chapters; retrospective to 2001 and earlier, where available; more than 3.2 million references from 1920 to 2000.
A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
The Punch Historical Archive allows users to navigate and search all issues, seasonal numbers and almanacks of what was once the world's most celebrated magazine of humour and satire (1841 to 1992).
The resources provides a unique insight into the politics, culture and society of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events has been put together by The Events Industry Forum in consultation with the UK events industry and the Health and Safety Executive. It aims to help organisers of large-scale music and similar events to ensure they are run safely.
Access for 50 simultaneous users. Please use the blue Log in button at the top right of the screen to view the guide and Log out to end your session.
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- Gale Virtual Reference Library
- Grove Art Online
- Oxford Bibliographies (Criminology)
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Oxford Handbooks Online (Business and Management, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Music, Psychology)
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias (Business & Management, Communication, Criminology & Criminal Justice, Economics & Finance, Education, Global Public Health, Literature, Psychology)
- Routledge Handbooks Online
For a description of each service above, see its separate entry in the main A-Z list.
RefWorks - an online research management, writing and collaboration tool - is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.
Note: In order to export references to RefWorks from library search results or other databases which support it, you need to be logged in to RefWorks first.
See Refworks' own user guide and video tutorials.
Rock's Backpages is the only comprehensive online database of pop music writing in the world. The database contains an ever-expanding collection of primary-source, full-text music writing.
Sourced from the pages of the music and mainstream press, it is a library of articles (reviews, interviews, features and more) from the early '60s up to present day and includes a growing collection of exclusive audio interviews.
The archive covers all types of popular music from the 1950s to the present: from Abba to Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones to the Stone Roses and from Elvis Presley to Eminem.
The archive provides access to issues of one of the most influential consumer magazines of the 20th-21st centuries, from its launch in 1967 to present.
It covers rock and popular music journalism, as well as wider entertainment topics such as film and popular culture.
Routledge Handbooks Online brings together the world’s leading scholars to provide an overview of classic and current research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, Psychology and Engineering, while also providing an authoritative guide to theory and method, key sub-disciplines and the primary debates of today.
The Archive of the Royal College of Physicians of London covers the history of medicine, medical humanities, medicine and culture, religion, and government, the establishment of public health systems, and the policies governing medical education and practice.
It contains a range of content from 1100-1862, including monographs, rare books, manuscripts, reports, medical education textbooks, anatomical drawings, public health surveys and photographs - all presented as fully searchable digital images.
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ScienceDirect provides the full text of about 1,600 journals, generally issues from 2008 onwards, but some going back to 1995.
Highlights include:
- Agricultural and Biological Collection (148 titles)
- Earth & Planetary Sciences Collection (109 titles)
- Environmental Sciences Collection (78 titles)
- Ireland Collection (107 titles)
- Psychology Collection (103 titles)
- Social Sciences Collection (161 titles)
*Availability of full text is indicated by a green book icon next to the journal title.
**If a journal isn't available, check the Library catalogue and/or journals A-Z to find out whether it's held elsewhere. If not, apply via interlibrary loans for a copy.
Screen Studies is a dynamic digital platform taking users from script to screen and beyond - offering a broad range of content from Bloomsbury, Faber & Faber and the British Film Institute to support moving-image studies. It is an essential resource for academics and students engaged in research and learning in film history, theory, and practice.
Highlights include:
- Auteur Film Studies
- The Bloomsbury and Faber Screenplays and Criticism Collection
- BFI Film Classics
- BFI Film Studies
- Filmmaking
*NEW for 2021* Auteur Film Studies brings together over 90 e‑books on popular and cult films including Inception, Blade Runner, Twin Peaks: Firewalk With Me, Pan's Labyrinth, and many more.
Shakespeare's Globe on Screen is a collection of thirty productions recorded live on stage. It features performances from leading actors including Mark Rylance’s Tony Award-winning role as Olivia in Twelfth Night and Roger Allam’s Olivier Award-winning role as Falstaff in Henry IV, as well as two productions from Emma Rice’s tenure as Artistic Director.
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Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 1 (2008-2015)
- Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018)
Shakespeare in Performance features rare and unique prompt books from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. The prompt books tell the stories of key performances in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and further afield, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
The manuscripts trace how Shakespeare's plays have been interpreted by theatre companies, actors and directors across the centuries, often containing personal notes, sketches and cues for lighting and music.
Designed for both teaching and research, this resource includes documents and collections from libraries and archives throughout the Atlantic from 1490 onwards.
Highlights include:
- High quality images of thousands of original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images not available elsewhere.
- A powerful portal with links to other significant peer-reviewed online sources.
- A series of contextual essays by leading international authorities. Each essay has links directly to primary sources.
- Thematic and Court Record tutorials enabling students and teachers multiple pathways into the primary sources.
Produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Global Sound is a encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides educators, students, and interested listeners with an unprecedented variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms.
SocINDEX covers sociology literature from 1895 on and contains about 1,300,000 records, including over 300 journals, over 500 books and abstracts, and some 600 core journals in full text.
Subjects covered:
- sociology
- criminology
- ethnic and racial studies
- gender
- the family
- politics
- social theory
- social structure
*If an article is not in full text, you can check the journals A-Z to find out whether it is held on another service or in print format. If it's not, you request an interlibrary loans.
State Papers Online, Eighteenth Century, covers the 18th century from the accession of the Hanoverian monarchs to the British throne in 1714 to the end of the State Papers series in 1782.
Statista is a comprehensive statistics platform with access to over 1.5 million data sets and with revenue forecasts up to 2025/2026 on over 400 industries. It also features many thousands of downloadable reports, studies and dossiers relating to a wide range of subject areas.
- Box of Broadcasts
- Dance in Video
- Digital Theatre Plus
- Fashion Studies Online
- Kanopy
- National Theatre Collection
- Theatre in Video
For a description of each service above, see its separate entry in the main A-Z list.
This archive provides access to the whole newspaper from its launch in 1822 until 2006, including; advertisements, obituaries, classified ads, photographs and articles. Complete page images are available and individual articles appear in their original context.
An interdisciplinary collection of digital content mapped to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGO includes book chapters, journal articles, essays, presentations, videos and case studies. Collection content is guided by an international Advisory Board of academics, practitioners, policy makers and officers in third sector, government and NGOs.
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Theatre in Video brings together classic and contemporary plays, documentaries and interviews from 20th century theatre history.
It incorporates celebrated performances of Shakespeare and rare footage of the work of Samuel Beckett alongside contemporary writers such as Philip Kan Gotanda, and new and international productions.
Interviews with directors, designers, writers and actors provide a view from behind-the-scenes.
This archive provides access to the whole newspaper, including advertisements, obituaries, classified ads, photographs and articles. Complete page images are available and individual articles appear in their original context.
Access breaking news, in-depth analysis, teaching and learning guides and research reviews.
Please note: in order to access TES, you first need to register for an account using your Bath Spa University email address.
This archive provides access to the whole TLS, containing every page of every copy for 100 years.
The Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT) is the best source of UK television and radio broadcast data available on the web. Over 350 television and radio stations are indexed, including terrestrial, cable and satellite television, and local and national radio.
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An archive of digitised materials for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
BSU subscribes to the following:
- III: Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment
- IV: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
Backfiles of video gaming magazines from the 1980s through to 2020, covering a wide variety of consoles / platforms and aspects of the industry. Titles include 'Computer and Video Games', 'PC Gamer' and 'Edge'.
The Vogue Archive is a unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from 1892 to today.
The archive is completely searchable, from the first issue to the current month, reproduced in high resolution colour page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling users to find images by garment type, designer and brand names.
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Westlaw UK provides full-text access to current and historic UK, EU and worldwide case reports and legislation. It also gives access to the Legal Journals Index, some full text law journals, and many law electronic books.
Subject areas cover UK, EU, and International Cases; UK, EU, and International Legislation. Wetlaw UK includes full text of various practitioner texts including: Chitty on Contracts; Clerk and Lindsell on Torts; Civil Procedure (White Book).
You will be prompted on first use to input your name and Bath Spa email address. You are advised that this will be processed by Westlaw in accordance with their privacy policy.
Westlaw Certification Material
Basic Certification
Advanced Certification
*Database included in library search
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