New York University | Bobst Library: Finding and Using Primary Materials for the Performing Arts

for the Performing Arts

Primary sources for the performing arts can be quite diverse. Scripts, images, artifacts, diaries, videos of live performance, newpaper reviews, playbills, motion pictures and more all can be considered primary sources for the performing arts.

Think of a primary source as:

"firsthand evidence"; it is FROM the time, not ABOUT the time.
written by the participants or observers.
also an artifact of the time, or an actual image from the time itself.

Primary sources can be both published and unpublished. Published documents - books, newspapers, pamphlets, advertisements, government reports, laws, etc. Scholarly journal articles that report results of original research are also considered primary sources. As are unpublished documents - letters, diaries, financial records, etc. Oral and visual artifacts - objects produced by human craft, such as speeches, recordings, paintings, photographs, films, archaeological finds, etc. - are also consider primary. Here are just a few examples of materials that constitute Primary Sources...

Diaries and correspondence	The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.	Ziegfeld Letter to Emily Holt from Lorenz Ziegfeld, June 14th 1929. Tamiment Library.

Scripts/ prompt books/ ephemera Prompt books are plays, texts with notes, cues, blocking and other production information.	Playbill- The Train Ride by Robert Johnson, Jr. Directed by Pamela Bloom at the American Theatre of Actors, February 9-13, 2001.	Playbill- The Train Ride by Robert Johnson, Jr. Directed by Pamela Bloom at the American Theatre of Actors, February 9-13, 2001.	Postcard- Yeats: Lenten Plays, Purgatory, Calvary and The Resurrection by William Butler Yeats, March 6th 8:00 PM Cathedral Church of St. John Divine, Directed by Mark Bloom
Ephemera are items, such as posters, broadsides, and theatre tickets, that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles.	Wayang Kulit Puppet.	Ticket Stub- Looking for Limbo, The American Living Room, July 31st, 2006, Here Arts Center.

Sound files
No Star Shines Sharper. A shadow play in verse for all ages, by Barbara Blatner
December 25, 2001. Radio broadcast on WFDU FM.
CAST: Rachel Whitman as Mary, and James Rana as the King
A Mystic Theatre Production

Fales Library - Downtown Performing Arts Collection, located on the 3rd fl. of Bobst.
http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/
The Fales Library is a major repository for New York experimental work. Included among our collections are the papers Richard Foreman, the Judson Memorial Church, Mabou Mines, the papers of Elizabeth Robbins, and a Theatre and Portrait Collection.

Online access to the primary: to access most primary material you will need to come into the library and use our collections, but some databases do offer full text access to primary sources. Here are just a few of them.

Proquest Historical Newspapers - New York Times (1851-2001) Los Angeles Times (1881-1984) Washington Post (1887-1988) Wall Street Journal (1899-1987) Christian Science Monitor (1908-1991) Chicago Tribune (1890-1985) Atlanta Constitution (1868-1925

The Shakespeare Collection (Gordon Crosse Diaries eye witness accounts of over 500 Shakespeare productions from 1890-1953)

Early American Imprints Series 1 & 2 (1639-1819) provides full-text access to 36,000 American books, pamphlets, playbills and broadsides.

In the First Person - Index to letters, diaries, oral histories and other personal narratives (please note! Some of this material is avail. Full text online, while some is housed at Columbia University)

LION (Literature Online) click on Individual Collections to find:
American Drama 1714-1950 Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth
English Drama A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
Twentieth Century Drama When complete, Twentieth-Century Drama will contain 2,500 plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present. Not to be confused with Twentieth Century North American Drama, this collection contains more Avant Garde plays.
Twentieth Century North American Drama When complete, Twentieth Century North American Drama will contain the full text of 1,500 plays written from the late 1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays.

NYPL Digital Archive - http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 450,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library

Theatre Museum (PeoplePlay UK) - http://www.peopleplayuk.org.uk/
The PeoplePlay Uk project contains 1500 digitised artefacts and art works from the museum's unique collections.

PADS (Performing Arts Data Service) - http://ahds.ac.uk/performingarts/
AHDS Performing Arts has a number of collections related to music, dance, theatre, radio, film and television.

GloPac - http://www.glopac.org/
GloPAC is an international organization of institutions and individuals committed to using innovative digital technologies to create easily accessible, multimedia, and multilingual information resources for the study and preservation of the performing arts. The database GloPAD is a multimedia, multilingual, Web-accessible database containing digital images, texts, video clips, sound recordings, and complex media objects (such as 3-D images) related to the performing arts from around the world.

Microfilm sets: the microfilm room is located on lower level 2 of Bobst. Microfilm is arranged alphabetically in the room, but check BobCat for location before going down.

The Abbey Theatre and Cultural Life.
American Theatre Periodicals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.
Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1942-1958- located in Tamiment.
Covent Garden Promptbooks.
Drama on the World Stage: Prompt Books and Performance Records.
Drury Lane under Sheridan, 1776-1812.
English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century.
Fin-de-siecle: Symbolist and Avant-garde Periodicals.
The Papers of David Garrick.
The Papers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.
Italian drama.
Little Magazines Series: Selected Complete Short-Run Cinema Periodicals, 1889-1972.
The Moscow Lenin Order Mosfilm Studio (1938-1945) = Moskovskaia kinostudiia "Mosfilm" (1938-1945).
Motion Picture Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, 1894-1908.
Music and Dance in Surinam: A Comprehensive Collection of Source Literature Extracted from over 4,000 Publications.
Nineteenth Century Theatre Periodicals.
Playbills: North American Nonprofit Repertory Theatres, 1958-1975, in the Collection of the Theatre Communcations Group, New York City.
The Popular Stage: Drama in Nineteenth Century England: The Frank Pettingell Collection of Plays...
The Pressbooks for United Artists, 1919-1949; Warner Bros., 1922-1949; and Monogram Pictures, 1937-1946.
Schomburg Center Clipping File, 1925-1974, Part II, 1975-1988.
Source Materials in the Field of Theatre.
Spanish Drama of the Golden Age.
The J. M. Synge Manuscripts.
Le Theatre de la Revolution et de l'Empire.
Three Centuries of English and American Drama.

To find out more about Primary Sources in Theatre, contact Pamela Bloom, performing arts librarian at pamela.bloom@nyu.edu.