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ProQuest One Performing Arts

ProQuest One Performing Arts Content

ProQuest One Performing Arts offers dynamic, multi-media content that connects foundational works — such as scripts, performances, and scores — with secondary materials including journal articles, publications, and reference resources. Integrating diverse content from classical music scores to dance videos, historical performance recordings, theatrical productions, and drama texts, enables deeper exploration of technical artistry, historical context, and cultural significance across different time periods.


Content types include:

  • Scholarly Reference: Books, Periodicals, Magazines, Liner notes, Photographs, Choreography and notations.
  • Streaming Audio: +14 Million streaming audio tracks across genres: classical. jazz, folk, world, pop.
  • Classical Scores: +2 Million pages of scores spanning major musical genres and periods, from Middle Ages to Present, from works by over 4,600 composers
  • Multimedia Video: +4.000 streaming videos: performances, documentaries, masterclasses, instructionsl films
  • Drama Texts: +12,000 plays covering Western and World theatre history from its origins to the early 21st century
  • Ephemera and Archives: +36,000 pages of primary source materials: sketches, technical drawings and more

The content has been organized to allow users to find information faster and explore topics more deeply.

Main Features

  • Theoretical and practical applications: through instructional reference works, video lectures, and presentations on theatrical techniques, performance practices, design, technical artistry, and cultural significance.  
  • Top providers: the Royal National Theatre, Boosey & Hawkes, Broadway on Demand, Balanchine Archives, Qwest TV, Smithsonian Folkways, and Universal Music Group.
  • Diverse content: Integrating and connecting classical music scores, dance videos, historical performance recordings, theatrical productions, and drama texts from across eras.

Music & Performing Arts Collection

The Music & Performing Arts Collection provides a cost-effective and efficient way for libraries to gain access to specialist databases for scholars and students researching music and the performing arts. The collection features scholarly and trade journals, magazines, books, newspapers, and reference works, covering a wide range of disciplines including dance, ballet, circus performance, popular music, puppetry, radio, stagecraft, theatre, classical music, and opera. The collection consists of two distinct databases:

  • Music Periodicals Database – This database supports music scholarship, theory, and practice with access to approximately 220 full-text titles and citations sourced from more than 600 music periodicals.
  • Performing Arts Periodicals Database – This database indexes around 400 scholarly and trade journals, magazines, books, and newspapers covering theater, dance, film, television, stagecraft, broadcast arts, storytelling, and more. It draws from both current files and selected backfiles to 1864 and 134 publications are included in full text.

The Music & Performing Arts Collection resides in the ProQuest platform.

Dance Online Collection

Dance Online is a rich subscription solution tailored for the dance community. It offers a collection of multimedia resources — ranging from primary to secondary — that cater to scholars, educators, students, and enthusiasts alike. Featuring video performances, instructional materials, interviews, books, periodicals, and extensive archival materials across dance genres, these materials support focused explorations into dance history, technique, and cultural context. 

Dance Online is a resource for dance scholarship that combines academic study with video performance and instruction. From research and theory to movement and technique, this collection enriches learning and professional growth for dance scholars, performers, and educators. 


Dance Online Includes: 

  • Dance Online: Dance Studies Collection 

  • Dance Online: Dance in Video, Volume I 

  • Dance Online: Dance in Video, Volume II 

  • Dance Online: Dance in Video, Volume III 

  • Dance Online: Dance in Video, Volume IV - The Dancio Collection 

 

Dance Online resides in the Alexander Street Multimedia platform.

Music Online: Classical Scores Library Collection

The Music Online: Classical Scores Library is a reliable and authoritative destination for in-copyright digital scores of the classical canon, as well as a resource for the discovery of diverse and lesser-known contemporary works. Classical Scores Library’s extensive collection of scores enhanced by powerful educational platform tools supports the teaching and learning of music history, performance, composition, and theory for today’s music scholars.

The Music Online: Classical Scores Library resides in the Alexander Street Multimedia platform.

Music Online: Listening Collection

Music Online: Listening is the most comprehensive and highest quality streaming audio collection to support the teaching and research of music.  It currently provides academic libraries with streaming access to over 10 million tracks*, and is growing monthly as new recordings are added.

Music Online: Listening provides coverage in breadth and depth across all the key musical genres:

  • Classical — All major genres and time periods from medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas, and the avant-garde.
  • Jazz —  All major genres including vocal jazz, bebop, acid jazz, big band, modern jazz, and more.
  • World —  Music from 169 countries and more than 1,000 cultural groups
  • American —  Country, folk, jazz, bluegrass, Western, old time, American Indian, blues, gospel, R&B, and shape note singing.
  • Popular —  Wide range of popular music from around the world that is not available in our genre-specific collections.
  • Historic Recordings —  Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries Volumes 1 + 2

The collections include the valuable recordings needed to support effective teaching and research, such as:

  • EMI: Almost 50,000 recordings featuring labels such as Blue Note, Virgin Classics, Angel Records, Capitol Records, Chrysalis, and Narada.
  • Universal: Nearly 10,000 recordings featuring labels like Verve, Motown, A&M, Decca, Polygram, MCA, and Island Def Jam.
  • Smithsonian: More than 40,000 recordings available from the Smithsonian’s archives, including the entire output of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Folkways Records, Cook Records, Dyer-Bennet Records, Fast Folk, Monitor Records, and Paredon Records.
  • Archives: Unique and previously unpublished recordings from important archives including the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University in South Africa, and the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in India.
  • Specially recorded: Exclusive audio recordings of hundreds of traditional American folk songs by acclaimed folklorist/folksinger Jerry Silverman.

Music Online: Listening resides in the Alexander Street Multimedia platform.

Drama Texts Collection

A foundational collection of dramatic texts for any institution wanting to teach the basics of drama.  With 13,500 plays it is the largest assembly of essential texts for Theatre students and teachers alike. 

The collection spans nearly a millennium of dramatic writing covering the historical canon of Western theatre from its earliest days right up to the key figures of the early 21st century. It provides the most studied and performed plays of canonical playwrights as well as their less well-known contemporaries, allowing for a comprehensive survey. 

Drama Texts Collection combines the following collections:

  • American Drama
  • Asian American Drama 
  • Black Drama, 3rd Edition 
  • Contemporary World Drama 
  • English Drama 
  • Latin American Drama
  • North American Indian Drama, 2nd Edition 
  • North American Women’s Drama, 2nd Edition 
  • Twentieth Century Drama
  • Twentieth Century North American Drama, 2nd Edition​

 

Drama Texts Collection resides in the Alexander Street Multimedia platform.

Theatre Performance & Design Collection

Theatre Performance and Design Collection is the first comprehensive, international collection that covers all aspects of theater from production and design to performance, from the 17th century through to the present day, including, set design, lighting design, sound design, costume design, makeup, and more. Theatre students and researchers can now truly see “behind the scenes” of the world’s greatest dramatic performances.  

Theatre Performance and Design Collection brings together Alexander Street’s premiere collections of video performances, audio dramas, and designs. Combining the most important video content types used in theatre education (filmed stage performances, masterclasses, documentaries) with top-of-the-line teaching tools (playlists, video clips, on-screen transcripts), and production designs, there really is no better way for faculty to bring the brilliance of stage right into their classrooms.

Included in the collection are:

390+ audio plays from L.A. Theatre Works
950+ hours of filmed stage performances, documentaries, and video training materials, including over 50 premium performances of plays and musicals from the BBC, Royal Shakespeare Company, and the UK's National Theatre
100,000 pages of primary and secondary design resources, including sketches, photographs, technical drawings, monographs, articles, and dissertations.
40,000 pages of monumental reference works, encyclopedias, images, flyers, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks, and other resources
 
Theatre Performance and Design Collection resides in the Alexander Stree Multimedia platform.

Theatre Performance and Design Collection contains the full collections of

  • Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection, Volumes I & II
  • BBC Literary Adaptations in Video
  • National Theatre Collection: Volumes I & II 
  • Performance Design Archive Online
  • The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
  • Theatre in Context Collection
  • Theatre in Video: Volumes I & II