Begin Your Research tutorial

Here is a really helpful UC research online tutorial, usable by any campus. Complete with a quiz, it's a great way to get students started who didn't have a library class and can't come in for help.  It was very helpful in training the McHenry Roving students.

Begin Your Research
http://www.lib.uci.edu/uc-research-tutorial/begin.html

Theater Arts: Finding play production reviews

An assignment this quarter for a Theater Arts class dealt with searching for production reviews and for a modern production of an ancient play (for example, "Medea"). Here are some strategies for dealing with this question (and more comments are welcome!):

• The best thing to show them is the Theater Arts Research Guide (home page > research guides > arts > theater arts)
• On that guide direct them to the International Index to the Performing Arts database. It's right on the front of the guide.
• Once in that database, they can try searching for the name of the play and "production review" and perhaps a geographic location if there were many places the play was produced. This should give them some full-text results they can look through.
• The other thing they may ask for is "Theatre World." Look that up as a title in Cruzcat, choose the first record in the results, and you see that the current volume is in Ref and the previous volumes are upstairs on 4th in the PNs. They'll determine which volume could help them by the year of the production of their play. 
• There are other resources they can try on the Theater Arts Research Guide as well.