by Dr. Patrick Finelli, University of South Florida

Most of us use the Web frequently for e-mail, booking travel reservations, paying bills, or finding loosely organized information through a search engine like Google or Yahoo. A common new verb to locate something on the Web is “Google.”  Theatre researchers may discover vast numbers of websites dedicated to historical figures or theatres, but it is much easier to purchase a ticket to a Broadway show than it is to find authoritative information commonly found in books and journal articles.

Most of the material on the Web is relatively new, and the enormous volume of printed works presents a formidable task for those who wish to digitize important texts and make them available on the Internet. Scholars and students can browse all of Shakespeare’s plays, poems and sonnets online, and readily search for words in their contextual occurrence electronically without relying upon the use of a bound edition of a concordance. Other canonical texts, plays and essays are available through your browser search engine, but scholars and researchers must know how to access what is commonly called the “deep Web,” such as electronic databases that index professional journals and provide copies of refereed articles sent to your e-mail account or virtual libraries with query-based search tools.  This repository of important information is largely invisible unless you know how to use the tools.  

You can’t Google your way to access points for copyrighted texts or academic journals. Many portals require a subscription, or status as a faculty member, staff, student or affiliated independent scholar at a university whose library has paid millions of dollars to subscribe to valuable resources for authentic theatre research like OCLC FirstSearch, Project Muse, or InfoTrack. Even in the age of technology, libraries are leading the way as the first source for locating material. In the coming months, we will describe the basic ways you can find books, abstracts, journal articles and a variety of other publications available to researchers on the open Web and the protected material on the deep Web.

The definition of theatre research has expanded to include endeavors beyond scholarship. These include archival and dramaturgical practices often performed by professional researchers who work outside of academia. There are many resources that dynamically update their databases with listings of newly published articles and books with links to the journals or publisher/distribution channels within the field of theatre research.