Research Guides: Theatre: FInd electronic and physical books

Books Page Summary

This page contains three sections, each with its own focus. The groups include:

Hard copy scripts: 3rd Floor of Newman Library near main elevators and Children's lit. Look up title/call number in Discovery Search FIRST if you need a specific script.

Electronic books and scripts databases

America's Historical Imprints from Readex
America's Historical Imprints is a digital collection containing virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America over a 200-year period. It is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties, and more. Scanned pages available as JPEG, TIFF, and PDF.

Also known as Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819. Contains virtually every known book, pamphlet and broadside published in America between 1640 and the first two decades of the 19th century—more than 75,000 printed items in all. Based on renowned bibliographies by Charles Evans and Roger Bristol and by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.
Drama Online
Drama Online provides over 2000 full-text plays and monologues You can search by content type, genre, period, author, setting, theme, cast size, and roles. Its Reader can show original pagination, tables of contents, or scholarly annotations, and you can add bookmarks and notes or extract citations or a parts book. The library subscribes to Nick Hern books, Canadian Playwrights, Stage on Screen, and the Hollow Crown.
EEBO: Early English Books Online from ProQuest
Early English Books Online contains scanned page images (GIF and TIFF) of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Coverages includes all subject areas with strong coverage in the humanities, performing arts, and education. Each is full-text searchable.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online from Gale
ECCO provides full-text books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements in HTML and PDF. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
Eighteenth Century Drama from Adam Matthew Digital
Eighteenth Century Drama provides digitized primary sources, the London Stage Database, and the Biographical Dictionary of Actors, 1660-1800. The majority of content is play scripts. Topics covered include censorship and politics, satire and social commentary, celebrity culture and fashion, opera, theatre business, women, staging, technology, and performance, representations of war, conflict, race, religion, and historical events, and representations of domestic, familial, and pastoral scenes. 1730-1830.
English Drama from ProQuest
English Drama contains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth.
Gale Ebooks
Gale Ebooks is a collection of searchable ebook reference works. You can search within a particular work or across the entire collection. Individual articles from these sources are presented in HTML and PDF. Illustrations, photos, maps, and multimedia content is often included.

Internet Movie Scripts Database
A large collection of movie scripts. The site lets you read or download movie scripts for free.

Open Library
A project of the non-profit Internet Archive, Open Library aims to create "one web page for every book published". It provides access to millions of digitized books, with free downloads available for books in the open domain and a lending system for in-copyright books.
Oxford Reference Online
Oxford Reference Online provides full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference works. Individual articles can be downloaded as PDFs.
Project Gutenberg
This is the oldest digital library, founded in 1971. It offers over 75,000 free ebooks consisting of older works for which the U.S. copyright has expired.

Finding books with Discovery Search

Discovery Search is the main library search tool. It functions a lot like a Google search, but instead of searching the entire internet, it searches our library resources lists to help you find out what we have and how to access it. You can limit your search to books only, which will give lists of physical and electronic books.

You can learn more about the academic research process, including Discovery Search tips, in the Getting started with academic research linked in the main menu of this guide.

Searching for "humanities" in Discovery Search results in over seven million results, which can be filtered down to only books.

How to Find and Check Out a Book

Join Moose, the therapy dog at Cook Counseling Center, as he finds and checks out a book at Newman Library.