How to Begin a Search

• Phrase information needed in the form of a question
• Decide what kind of information your looking for
  • Scholarly journals
  • Popular periodicals such as New York Times
  • Textbooks
• Decide how much you're looking for. Are you looking for several recent articles, or writing a paper and need background information from textbooks plus journal articles?

Once you've answered these questions you're ready to locate books or select a database to locate journal articles:

How to Find a Book

How to Find an Article

Check the Business of the Performing Arts page. This guide selectively identifies resources at Bobst Library which approach dance, film and television, music, and theatre from a business and management perspective.

For a more detailed description of how to develop a search strategy, go to:
http://wally.rit.edu/depts/ref/instruction/tutorial/searchstrategy.html.

Recommended Databases for Research in Performing Arts Administration

The following databases are recommended for research. They can be accessed from The Arch by choosing Theater or Performing Arts, or selecting them by name from the "Find Databases by Title and Category" page at http://library.nyu.edu/collections/databases.html.

For more information on electronic database searching see the NYU Libraries Tutorial: How to Find an Article.

The NYU Libraries Tutorial: Boolean Searching will teach you how to use AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden your search.

1. ABI/INFORM - Provides citations and abstracts to articles from business and trade journals published in English. Covers business topics in general, particularly advertising, banking, finance, insurance, international trade, management, marketing and real estate.
2. ARTICLE FIRST - An OCLC index of articles from nearly 12,500 journals, Article First covers topics such as business, humanities, medicine, popular culture, science, social sciences, and teachnololy. Includes items listed on the table of contents pages of journals. Describes one article, news story, letter, or other item from a journal in each record. Provides a list of libraries that have the journal title for most items.
3. ARTS AND HUMANITIES CITATION INDEX - Covers over 1,150 of the world 's leading arts and humanities journals in a broad range of disciplines. Also covers individually selected, relevant items from over 5,000 of the world 's leading science and social science journals. Use the easy search mode, click on either TOPIC or PERSON then either ABOUT or AUTHORED BY.
4. CPANDA (CULTURAL POLICY & THE ARTS NATIONAL DATA ARCHIVE) - CPANDA, the Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive, is the world's first interactive digital archive of policy-relevant data on the arts and cultural policy in the United States.
5. FACTIVA - Use Factiva to browse leading newspapers, news magazines and newswires, search 6,000 newswires, magazines and journals, search essential business, government, industry websites, find company, industry, country and market reports.
6. FOUNDATION DIRECTORY - Updated monthly, the directory contains information about the largest 10,000 public and private foundations in the U.S. and links to foundation web sites.
7. GUIDESTAR - The national database of U.S. charitable organizations, gathers and distributes data on more than 850,000 IRS-recognized nonprofits.
8. INGENTA - Ingenta provides access to article summaries from over 25,000 publications linked to the full text of over 5,200 titles. Full text access is set by each of 170 Ingenta publisher partners, but individual subscribers, or individuals within institutions that subscribe, can access the full text of their publications for free, and set up fee email Search and TOC (table of contents) Alerting service.
9. INTERNATIONAL INDEX TO THE PERFORMING ARTS - IIPA Full Text draws its current content from more than 200 scholarly and performing arts periodicals, and also indexes a variety of documents such as biographical profiles, conference papers, obituaries, interviews, discographies, reviews and events. IIPA covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry, including dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic and more. Most IIPA Full Text records in the current coverage (1988 forward) contain an abstract, and additionally many IIPA Full Text records contain the corresponding full text of the original article. The most valuable feature of this database, is its retrospective coverage. Articles can go back as far as 1864.
10. JSTOR - JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines.
11. PROQUEST - A multi-disciplinary resource, especially useful for research on contemporary topics or for the beginning stages of a research project. Offers citations from a wide range of English language academic journals, news magazines, and the full text of the New York Times dating back to 1851. LexisNexis and Factiva are similar, but LexisNexis has a greater number of foreign language news sources whereas Factiva has greater regional coverage.
12. WILSON OMNI - Wilson OmniFile is a multi-disciplinary database providing the complete content- indexing, abstracts, and full text - from six of Wilson's full-text databases: Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Humanities Full Text, Readers Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, Wilson Business Full Text.

There are many databases on the Bobst Web Page. Feel free to explore more of them, especially if your topic has a social science (psychology, sociology, education, business etc.) slant. If you're not sure which database to use, try The Arch.

Important Catalogs

• OCLC AND RLIN - If you are doing exhaustive research, want to know EVERYTHING about the subject or person, or if you are just finding the topic difficult to research, you will most certainly want to use OCLC and RLIN. These very large catalogs give locations of books, videotapes, location of archives, scores, computer files, manuscripts and more.

Internet Sites

• ArtsLynx
  Why wander all around the web when you can find the most comprehensive and scholarly sites all in one place! Artslynx International Dance listings are curated by Richard Finkelstein. Only the very best, most useful, and unique resources are chosen in for inclusion within these pages. The site is meticulously maintained seldom will you find broken links.
• The Foundation Center
  The Foundation Center's Web site offers some of the best general and specialized information retrieval tools on the Internet. If you're looking for information about foundations, you've come to the right place! Click on Searchzone to search their database.

Having trouble finding information on the World Wide Web?

Go to http://library.nyu.edu/research/tutorials/www/
Here you will find some of the best strategies for searching and evaluating the information located on the web.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Just do a search on Google Book Search or on Google.com. When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you'll see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows information about the book plus a few snippets - a few sentences of your search term in context. You may also see the Sample Pages View if the publisher or author has given us permission or the Full Book View if the book is out of copyright. In all cases, you'll also see 'Buy this Book' links that lead directly to online bookstores where you can buy the book.