LibGuides: Finding Databases College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies: English

Databases

The Library provides access to several databases relevant to English, including:

ACLS humanities e-book This link opens in a new window Provides full-text and full-page-image access to about 5000 titles in most humanities disciplines and in area studies. The books included have been recommended by scholars as significant contributions to their respective fields.
Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window Founded in 2009, Digital Theatre+ is the world’s leading educational platform for English and the Performing Arts, providing over 3 million students, within over 1000 schools, colleges and universities, across 65 countries, with access to 600+ theatre productions and educational resources. We collaborate with renowned theatre companies, actors and creatives to capture live performances in stunning quality and bring you insights from behind the scenes; we curate the very best productions from over 50 of the world’s leading arts organisations; and we commission educational resources from leading practitioners and academics.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window Drama Online provides the fulltext of over 1200 plays and over 100 scholarly works. It provides contextual and critical background through scholarly works and practical guides. From the epic to the monologue; ensemble to one-person plays; comedy to tragedy; the historical to the contemporary; and from the highly political to the profoundly personal there is plenty to discover. The collection features the pre-eminent theatre lists of Methuen Drama the Arden Shakespeare and Faber and Faber as well as production photos from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Drama Online is continually updated.
National Theatre Collection This link opens in a new window High definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies.
Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window From the first book printed in English by William Caxton through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War Early English Books Online (EEBO) will contain over 125000 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) and the Early English Tract Supplement - all in full digital facsimile from the Early English Books microfilm collection.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window Over 180000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 are available. The following modules are available to search within the database: History & Geography Fine Arts & Social Science Medicine Science & Technology Literature & Language Religion and Philosophy Law General Reference.
Electronic Enlightenment This link opens in a new window Searchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. Coverage includes letters and documents, document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources. With over 67,800 letters and documents and over 8,300 correspondents, EE is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century.
English Short Title Catalogue This link opens in a new window This catalogue contains records for items of all types published in Great Britain or its colonies from 1473 to 1800.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window Provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window LION contains over 355000 works of English and American poetry drama and prose 389 fulltext literature journals and other key criticism and reference resources. Note: LION also cross-searches MLA International Bibliography.
MLA Directory of Periodicals This link opens in a new window The MLA Directory of Periodicals provides detailed information on journals and book series in the fields of literature, language, linguistics, film, rhetoric and composition, and folklore
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window MLA indexes scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1926 & contains 2 million+ records. MLA Directory of Periodicals gives full info. on 7,100+ journals & book series. Accompanied by installation software on computer disk or CD-ROM.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text affordable and user-friendly online access to high quality humanities arts and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature This link opens in a new window RILM is a comprehensive music bibliography featuring citations, abstracts, and indexes. It includes over 570,000 records on traditional music, popular music, and classical music, representing disciplines that include musicology, ethnomusicology, pedagogy, psychology, anthropology, sociology and others. RILM covers all document types: articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, Festschriften, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, electronic resources, reviews, and more. Over 33,000 new records are added every year.
The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (TLS) (1902-2014) This link opens in a new window The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive contains every page of every copy of the TLS published from 1902 to 2014.

More databases for English is available here.

Databases Explained

Databases are collections of resources such as journal articles and conference papers, and also sometimes book chapters and reports. If you are doing a literature search or systematic review they are a key resource to use.

How to Access Databases

It's very simple. You can access any of the Library's databases just by searching the Library Catalogue. Simply enter the name of the database in the search box and click on the database link in the search results. Remember to log in for full access.

Searching within a Database

When you are searching a database, you can access content by searching under:

subject heading or keyword
title
author
journal name

Getting to the full-text

There are two main kinds of database:

Bibliographic - they won't show you the full paper straight away, but you can often read an abstract and see the author details. You'll need to check using if the library has access to the journal article
Full text - will let you open and read the article directly from the list of results

Finding Databases College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies

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