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start your research by picking a topic and learning about scholarly articles and other types of sources
plan and organize your research with our assignment calculator and citation tools
use library databases to get scholarly information and sources on your topic
find sources including scholarly and peer reviewed articles, books, and primary sources
learn about citations and use tools to cite and manage your sources
communicate your research through presentations, posters, or visualizations
find ways to get help both in-person and online
General Research Tools
- ARTstorARTstor is a cross-disciplinary image database. It offers collections of approximately 300,000 art images and descriptive information covering art, architecture and archeology.
- Libraries SearchSearch the University of Minnesota Libraries to find books, scholarly journal articles, news, magazines, media, and other items in the University's collection. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
- Proquest Historical NewspapersSearch old editions major U.S. newspapers and the Times of India. Papers include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Other titles include the Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers is an archive of over 60 newspapers from all over the country and the world, including leading publications from jazz and theatre hubs like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. These are helpful resources for reviews of records and performances, obituaries, and other articles that were contemporary with the performances and works you're researching.
- UMediaDiscover 161,819 images, maps, manuscripts, video, audio, and more. UMedia provides open access to digitized materials from across the University of Minnesota.
- WorldCatFind books, journals, articles, maps, music scores, sound recordings, films, theses/dissertations, machine-readable data files, and any other materials available in libraries worldwide. All subject areas are covered. Request items through Interlibrary Loan using the ILLiad link on each item's record. A mobile version of this database is available. Limited to 65 simultaneous users.
Find DANCE and MUSICAL THEATRE Digital, Print, and Media Resources
- The BroadwayHD CollectionSome of the best live theatre straight from Broadway! Award-winning writers, directors and actors become partners in theatre, drama, dance, music, and literature studies.
- Dance in VideoDance in Video contains dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.
- Dance Online: Dance Studies CollectionHistorical context of 20th and 21st century dance through 150,000 pages of exclusive periodicals, reference materials, books, dance notation, and photographs, including the complete run of Dance Magazine (1927–present).
- International Bibliography of Theatre and DanceSearch dance and theater arts journals on topics such as performing arts, ballet, drama, opera, film, and more.
- Performing Arts Archive
Preserving Minnesota’s cultural legacy in music, theater, and dance, the Archives holds scripts, prompt books, costume and set designs, photos, and AV recordings from organizations, actors, designers, and directors.
- Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity byThe Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity.
- Performance Design Archive OnlineComprehensive, international collection that covers all aspects of theater production design, from the 17th century through to the present day, including, scenic and set design, lighting design, sound design, costume design, makeup, and more.
- Performing Arts Periodicals DatabaseSearch journals on a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more. Formerly the International Index to Performing Arts.
- Project MuseSearch for full-text journals in literary theory, classics, history and cultural studies, philosophy, film, theater and performing arts, political science, and mathematics.
- Theatre in Video: Volume IWatch hundreds of online videos, including documentaries and definitive performances of the worlds most important plays. From Shakespeare to rare, in-depth footage of the work of Samuel Beckett including a range of 20th century theatre history. Interviews with directors, designers, writers, and actors, along with excerpts of live performances deliver an authentic, behind-the-scenes look at hundreds of productions.
- Writing About Dane byPublication Date: 2010Writing About Dance guides students through processes of writing about dance, from the informal (journal writing and free writing) to the formal (critiques, essays, and research papers). Students become better critical thinkers and writers as they deepen their understanding of dance technique, dance creativity, and dance as an art form.
Find streaming MUSIC and DANCE media
Why use streaming media from the Libraries? YouTube and Spotify have lots of great content, but there are a few drawbacks to them:
- Particularly in the case of YouTube, the information about the content (for example: dates, performer names, performance locations, etc.) may not be entirely accurate or complete. Anyone can upload content to YouTube, so when you rely on this resource, you're relying on the poster to describe the content accurately. You don't have to worry about this when it comes to Libraries resources - the information about the content (also called the metadata) is always accurate!
- Videos on YouTube can disappear with no warning. In the Libraries, we ensure that you have reliable access to audio and video content that we purchase or to which we subscribe.
- Liner notes (often found in the booklets that come with CDs and sometimes accompanying DVDs) can be fantastic resources, and some of our Libraries databases provide access to PDF versions of these! Liner notes can provide background information about artists, the history of particular pieces, translations, and more. These materials aren't available through YouTube and Spotify!
Some relevant streaming media databases available through the Libraries include the following:
- Database of Recorded American MusicSubscription has been cancelled effective 12/31/2022. The Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) is a collaboration between New World Records, Composers Recordings Inc., and New York University. DRAM offers on-demand access to audio-streaming files of complete works by American composers. More than 4,000 albums from over 40 independent record labels and archives, documenting over 7,500 compositions from the catalogs of the New World, CRI, Albany, innova, Cedille, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening, Mutable, and other record labels. Ranging from folk to opera, native American to jazz, 19th-century "classical" to early rock, and musical theater to contemporary, electronic, and more, DRAM's goal is to make available for educational use and scholarly research the widest possible spectrum of recorded American music. Alongside the high-quality music streams, complete liner notes, scholarly essays, bibliographies, and discographies are available for viewing on the Database. Playlists can be created by faculty to address specific curriculum needs.
- Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns10 episodes tracing the history of Jazz from its roots in the African-American community of New Orleans to its heights and continuing presence.
Episode 1. Gumbo (ca. 90 min.) -- episode 2. The gift (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 3. Our language (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 4. The true welcome (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 5. Swing : pure pleasure (ca. 90 min.) -- episode 6. Swing : the velocity of celebration (ca. 105 min.) -- episode 7. Dedicated to chaos (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 8. Risk (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 9. The adventure (ca. 120 min.) -- episode 10. A masterpiece by midnight (ca. 120 min.). - Jazz at Lincoln CenterExplore streaming and digital content for education, interviews with performers, and archival footage of concerts from the Jazz at Lincoln Center program.
- Music Online: Jazz Music LibraryJazz Music Library streams over a half-million audio tracks from about 45,000 albums issued by such major labels as Verve, Impulse, Jazzology, Black Swan, Circle Records, Paramount, Concord, Fantasy, Milestone, Monterey Jazz Festival Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, Peak, Prestige, Riverside, Stretch Records, and Original Jazz Classics. The list of artists ranges from Buddy Guy, Charlie Parker, Chuck Mangione, Dinah Washington, Diana Krall, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Grover Washington, Jr., Les Paul, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Peggy Lee, to Quincy Jones, Ramsey Lewis, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Billie Holliday, Thelonius Monk, Tony Bennett, and many others.
Interested in finding more Libraries streaming media resources? Check out the "Find Streaming Audio" and "Find Streaming Video" tabs of the Music-Related Databases Guide!
Find MUSIC RESOURCES
Looking for music-specific scholarship, primary sources, and reviews that can help you understand how jazz and musical theatre was perceived and disseminated? Resources like music encyclopedias, newspapers, and digital magazine archives can help!
Explore background information, composer and performer biographies, and historical context in music-specific encyclopedias:
Start with:
- Oxford Music OnlineSearch this authoritative collection for music research resources charting the diverse histories and cultures of music around the globe. Access is limited for 8 simultaneous users.
Oxford Music Online is a scholarly source for trustworthy and thorough background information about styles of music, composers, performers, and more. In addition to entries about musical theatre, jazz, jazz's many subgenres, and many of the choreographers and performers you're discussing in class this semester, there's an excellent entry on "Musical Theater Dance" by dance historian Claude Conyers that may be of interest to you - and this entry is accompanied by a fantastic bibliography of other relevant resources!
Next, explore:
- Bloomsbury Music and SoundBloomsbury Music and Sound provides an in-depth analysis of popular music in a global context. It includes the entirety of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the 33 1/3 series of books exploring key albums.
- African American Music ReferenceFind articles on the blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression from encyclopedias, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies.
Find primary sources like record and performance reviews, obituaries, and contemporary opinion pieces in the following databases - these resources will give your research depth and richness:
- RIPM Jazz PeriodicalsHigh-quality scans of historical American jazz periodicals. RIPM (LeRépertoire international de la presse musicale) was founded in 1980 under the auspices of the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML), with a mission to preserve and to provide access to eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century periodical literature dealing with music, and to facilitate and encourage research based on the press. RIPM Jazz Periodicals currently contains 125 jazz journals, covering the period from 1914 to 2010.
- Music Magazine Archive (Rock, Folk, and Hip-Hop & Rap)Search historic magazines focused on Rock, Folk, and Hip-Hop & Rap of a diverse and influential group of magazines. These publications uniquely capture the social and historical context including race, class, gender, American studies, youth culture, and more.