Key databases relevant for the Performance subjects (Acting, Comedy, Dance, Drama and Theatre Production) are listed below. A full list of all our databases can be found on the databases page.
- Arts Professional is a news and information service for art sector professionals. It also provides events guides, weekly jobs bulletins and professional development updates.
- Bloomsbury Fashion Central: a useful resource for Theatre Production costume designers.
- Box of Broadcasts - BoB: 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.
- Drama Online: full text of over 1,920 popular and critically-acclaimed plays, with supporting critical guides.
- Digital Theatre Plus: 340+ streamed films of leading British theatre productions; supported by additional content, including interviews with the creative and production teams and written study guides.
- Dress and Costume Library The first comprehensive online collection for the interdisciplinary study of dress and costume history, design and making, which brings together primary source material, authoritative scholarly books and reference works, practical costume-making guides, exclusive overview articles and videos analysing garments in detail, together with a timeline of costume through the ages.
- Eighteenth Century Drama 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.
- Gale Onefile: News: provides access to full-text newspapers. The database offers a one-stop source for current news and searchable archives.
- International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance: includes fully searchable access to more than 160 full-text journals.
- JSTOR: contains the back runs of several dance and performance journals, e.g. Asian Theatre Journal, Classical Quarterly, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Shakespeare Quarterly, TDR: Drama Review, Theatre Journal.
- National Theatre Collection: gives access to the National Theatre Collections 1 and 2 drawing on 10 years of NT live broadcasts plus high-quality archive recordings of 50 filmed performances.
- Project MUSE: contains over 300 journal titles. Similar in content to JSTOR, but the advantage of MUSE is that it covers current journal titles.
- 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.
- 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.
- Smithsonian Global Sound 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.
- Theatre in Video: access to some 500 hours of online streaming video, covering a wide range of topics from productions of Shakespeare plays to rare footage on Samuel Beckett.
- WGSN Fashion and Insight provides forecasting, market intelligence and trend analysis for style, fashion and design, and includes a fashion image library.
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