INTRODUCTION TO DANCE RESEARCH: SOME LIBRARY RESOURCES

This sheet is intended to help you get started with a research topic. It’s not comprehensive – you may be able to find many other useful resources elsewhere. But it might help you get an initial list of useful things together.

“Dance resources” area on the Music Library website (www.library.uiuc.edu/mux). Provides links to such resources as the Oxford Dictionary of Dance, the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance in Full-Text, and links to various dance web sites.

Subject headings in the UIUC libraries catalog can help you narrow down your search focus, and can help you find useful keywords to describe your topic. Check out the “dance” entry, and you’ll find lots of subdivisions, such as “Mechanization in dance”, and “modern dance”.

Library “Online Research Resources” page for “Dance”. There are 29 links to dance resources here. Some are duplicated in the Music Library’s “Dance resources” area, but not all.

Newspapers/blogs/transcripts of radio and tv broadcasts can be found by searching the “Lexis Nexis Academic” site, or by selecting the name of a newspaper – e.g., “New York Times” – from the library’s “Online Research Resources” page.

A new resource is the new UIUC Library Gateway, which became available only last week. This gateway also allows you to search for particular dance subjects, both in the library and outside it. See www.library.uiuc.edu.

Some sample searches:

The following searches may give an idea of how useful/not useful some of the resources above may be.

1. search for “dance” under “subject” in the UIUC online library catalog. Note that there are many subdivisions.

2. try searching the International Index to the Performing Arts for “Mechanization in dance”, or for “Tango Buenos Aires”

3. try searching for “Mechanization” and “dance” in the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance in Full Text.

4. try searching Lexis Nexis Academic under “New York Times Merce Cunningham Dance Company”

5. try blog searching under “Cirque du soleil”

John Wagstaff

September 2007