Sam Robinson "We've Got It Co."
Yale Collection of American Literature
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
There are several major strategies for searching Orbis (the library's online catalog) and databases for materials on African American Performance. The exact strategy may vary a little depending on what database you use. Also, don't neglect print resources, since many of the online resources don't go further back than the mid-1980s.
There are two basic types of searches you can use for discovering materials: Subject searches and Keyword searches. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses, so you should try both when you conduct your searches, especially in the Orbis catalog.
NOTE: Orbis subject headings always use the spelling THEATER, not THEATRE.
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When you do a Keyword search, you cast the net broadly, because it will pick up matching words in every field. Keyword searches can catch titles that narrower approaches can miss, because they look through the information in all fields (including notes, which may include the table of contents or photo descriptions). For example, the book The African golf club: a blackface farce by Jeff Branen can only be discovered by doing a Keyword search for blackface. Similarly, a Keyword search for Hansberry and performance brings up one title, and if you look at the Orbis record in Long View, you'll see that the notes include the Table of Contents. But you may also get irrelevant hits: in this case, you may notice that the book found through the Hansberry and performance search doesn't actually have any articles specifically on performances of Hansberry's plays (the terms appear in different places). Worse, if you do a Keyward search for "New York" you'll get (among other things) everything published in New York. By the way, notice that you must put phrases like "New York" in quotation marks when you do a Keyword search, or else Orbis won't understand what you're trying to do.
So, Keyword searches can be tremendously valuable, but you may need to work your way through the results list (and/or refine your search) in order to find titles you really want. But you can improve your Keyword searching by using Orbis's Advanced Search page, which allows you to restrict keywords to particular fields. That way you can restrict New York (as a phrase) to the Subject field, and so forth. Advanced Search does not take and/or/not terms or quotation marks: use the dropdown box to tell Orbis how to treat the words you enter.
Subject searches are (relatively speaking) "precision" searches, since they find only those items which catalogers have determined belong in a certain category (at they usually give books the narrowest category they can). One of the great advantages of Subject searches is that when there are several terms (or several spellings) for something, the subject headings gather all versions under one term. For instance, books on the Black Panthers will be found under the term Black Panther Party. So a Keyword search for Black Panthers brings up only 30-40 entries, while a Subject search for Black Panther Party retrieves around 100.
Below are some examples of subject headings (in no special order) used in Orbis for African American performance and related topics. Note that you do NOT need to know exactly how the subject heading reads. You can enter a partial subject heading and that will produce a list that you can use to select the heading that matches your interest.
Of course, you often won't know what the best subject terms are. Often you can use a Keyword search to find a title that fits your topic, and when when you look at the record, you'll see what subject heading(s) it has, which you can use to find similar books. In a few cases you may discover that there is no subject heading at all, such as for the Black Arts Movement, so occasionally a Keyword search is your only option. And as explained above, sometimes Keyword searches can find things that Subject searches can't.
The term "Black" has been phased out of subject headings referring to African Americans (though you may still encounter a few entries with it). "Black" is used for Africans and for people of African descent in South America and other parts of the world.
Many databases allow both Keyword and Subject databases, but others provide only Keyword searching. When it's possible to do Subject searches, keep in mind that the subject terms in other databases may not be the same as the ones in Orbis.
A Possible Step Saver: Bibliographies
Bibliographies are books or articles that list publications (usually both books
and articles) on a particular topic up through the year or year before the bibliography
was publlished. Often bibliographies break down the resources into special categories,
and some of them even include annotations so you can see if the work really
touches on the topic you're interested in. This can save you a lot of time,
since the bibliographer usually searches extensively and so finds items you
might not, and provides you with additional information so you don't waste time
looking at irrelevant materials. Some bibliographies are broad, such as Dissertations
Concerning Black Theatre (1992); others are highly specific, like August
Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1998). To look for bibliographies,
perform an Advanced Search in Orbis that includes the keyword Bibliography
in the Subject headings.
Finding Secondary Resources
This page lists the major indexes, databases, bibliographies and other reference
works for research on African American performance.
Yale University Library Research Guide for African American
Theater
Last modified
Thu, 12 Aug 2004
. © Yale
University Library.
Comments to Tobin
Nellhaus, Librarian for Drama, Film and Theater Studies