THRE 1310 (Rebecca Conway): Introduction to Theatre
Purpose: To help you, mainly, to find good sources of images useful for designing your show. Secondly, to help you research other aspects of the play if necessary.
Books
- Cornette Library's online catalog
- Includes books throughout the library, as well as e-books, government documents, videos, and journal titles. Tips for searching:
- Start with a keyword search for your topic. The fewer terms you require a catalog record to have, the more results you'll get. Remember also that the catalog only recognizes a phrase rather than two unconnected words if you use the drop-down menu to tell it to.
- Use the subject phrase "pictorial works" to find books that are principally photos and images. The keyword phrase "chiefly illus." may also prove useful.
- For more books with images, you can add to your topic keywords the abbreviation illus, for books added to the catalog before 1980 or ill, for books added since 1980. Such abbreviations are found on the Details field of the catalog record of books that have illustrations and will limit your results to only those books.
- Don't hesitate to browse the Loan shelves in a given subject area, but do use the catalog to get an idea of the relevant range of the shelves.
- WorldCat
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- Online catalog of books at libraries throughout the U.S and around the world.
- Indicates clearly which books Cornette Library has.
- Use all the same tactics as with our catalog and find many more good results. Especially helpful to find books that are principally photos and images may be the subject phrase "pictorial works".
- Request books not in Cornette Library with embedded link for Interlibrary Loan. Allow up to three weeks for the books to arrive.
- Reference books
- Can be a good place to turn for background factual information or analysis of specific plays. Usually you want to search for a more general work, such as Drama Criticism, that will include articles on the specific topic you want.
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Magazines and Journals
Print Images from Magazines
Old popular magazines with lots of photos in them can be an excellent source of the images you need.
- Bound volumes of image-heavy print magazines from earlier decades are on our 2nd floor.
- Some useful magazines are:
- Life (1936 to 1972)
- Look (1955 to 1971)
- National Geographic (1888 to present)
- Harper's Bazaar (1966 to 1981)
- Vogue (1942 to 1981)
- Travel (1917 to 1977)
- The Saturday Evening Post (1922 to 1981)
- The Rotarian (1922 to 1998)
- Better Homes and Gardens (1928 to 1989)
- House Beautiful (1917 to 1989)
- Seventeen (1965 to 1989)
- Time (1928 to 1981)
- Architectural Digest (1975 to 1989)
- Americana (1973 to 1990)
- Use The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature to find coverage of your specific topic in a very old magazine. Ask at the Reference Desk for assistance with this.
Journal Articles indexed in Databases
- Use periodical databases to find articles with detailed, focused information and analysis on specific topics.
- Off-campus, log in with your Buff Advisor username (for example, js123456) and your Buff Advisor password.
- Database citations not in full-text may be located in Cornette Library's online catalog, or the list of online journals.
- Use Interlibrary Loan to request articles inaccessible through Cornette library.
- JSTOR
- Back volumes for 375+ journals providing complete coverage of journals from first issues, but not the most current 2-5 years. Strong coverage of the arts and humanities.
- Academic Search Complete
- Contains abstracts and citations for a broad range of topics, with substantial full-text. Over 3,000 peer-reviewed sources.
- MLA International Bibliography
- Contains more than 1.8 million citations about language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. Includes criticism and analysis of plays. Source types include journals, books, dissertations, bibliographies and conference proceedings.
- Other topics and databases?
- Follow the links from the Subject Guides page.
Logo
- Displays in most of our databases. Links from a citation to one or more of the following:
- One or more links to full-text of the cited article,
- A link to a pre-set search of the Cornette Library catalog for the cited item,
- A link to a pre-filled Interlibrary Loan request form for the article, or
- A link to various help options.
- For more information see the tutorial Using SFX to Link to Articles
Need Help?
- Ask at the Reference Desk (first floor) or Periodicals Desk (second floor).
- Call 651-2215 during the hours Cornette Library is open.
- Use the "Ask A Librarian" form for electronic reference support.
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Online Image Searching
- OAIster
- Records of digital resources from open-archive collections worldwide. 23 million+ records about digital resources from over 1,100 contributors. While the "Document Type" limiter unfortunately doesn't work (as of Dec 8, 2011), if you include
photo*
among your keywords, you should pretty much limit your results to photographs and photographic prints. - The New York Times (1851 - 2006)
- Images of all material published in this important U.S. newspaper. Click on "More Search Options" and choose "Photo standalone" from "Document type."
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
- About 1.2 million digital images from the Library of Congress's pictorial holdings, nicely searchable.
- VADS, the Visual Arts Data Service
- Based at the Farnham Campus of the University College for the Creative Arts in Great Britain, this site offers over freely available 100,000 images in many specific organized and searchable collections.
- The Flickr Commons
- The popular photo sharing site Flickr has a pool of images limited strictly to the digitized photos from the collections several major museums, archives, and libraries.
- Important Limiters for searching Google Images
- You can limit your results in Google to pages from specific sites or kinds of sites by including along with your search terms text such as site:wtamu.edu or, for all colleges and universities but only colleges and universities, site:.edu. This way, even if you're searching Google Images instead of OAIster, you're more likely to get archival content from universities.
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Citing Your Sources
Why must I cite the sources I use for research projects?
- To give credit to the author of the information you use.
- To avoid plagiarism (WTAMU Code of Student Life: Appendix I-Academic Integrity Code),
a serious offense that can result in failure or expulsion. - So that others can verify the information.
- To assist others in doing their own research.
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Your Comments
- Suggestions for improvements?
- Particularly helpful items?
- please email Linda Chenoweth.
Thank you.
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