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Review from Library Journal/NetConnect, July
2006
Review from: Choice, June 2006
Review from:
Booklist, April 15, 2006
Review
from: Library Journal/NetConnect, July 2006
Released earlier this year, Play Index provides
bibliographic control over some 30,000 plays published individually
or in anthologies and collections going back to 1949. According to
Wilson, it represents "every important play ever written" in English
or available in English translation-from classical Greek drama
through the works of contemporary artists.
The chief use of Play Index is to locate plays
that are suited to a user's particular production resources, which
might include settings as diverse as a preschool puppet show, a
college production of Beckett, or a local repertory company that's
planning its season's dramatic offerings. Moreover, there are over
500 monologs in the database, suitable for auditions or classroom
interpretation. The descriptive annotation for each database entry
includes a plot summary, notes on musical requirements, the number
of interior and exterior sets required for staging, as well as
extensive casting and production details. For plays published
individually, publisher, date, pagination, ISBN, and LC number are
supplied, and for plays in collections there's a link to the
complete bibliographic information.
There is no full text per se, but the WilsonLink capability will
launch a search to try to locate electronic versions that may be
available openly on the web.
Searchability Wilson assigns subjects to the plays
included in the database, so a search in Basic or Browse mode (or in
the online Thesaurus for that matter) allows users to find plays on
specific themes, as well as in particular forms or dramatic genres
(farces, mystery and detective plays, one-act plays, pantomimes,
plays in verse, radio plays, etc.). The controlled vocabulary also
enables searching on personal and organization names, topical terms,
geographic names, and uniform titles.
Entering "monologs" and "dogs" in the single
searchbox displayed in Basic mode combines a term from the Genre
index with the desired subject keyword. Records retrieved provide
Play Title, Play Author, a two-line Play Abstract, the number of
Act(s) in the play, and the Cast requirements. Play Subjects are
hyperlinked to facilitate additional retrieval. Wilson's Update Code
and Accession Number are also displayed.
The link labeled "Find this play in a book" looks
up the full publication information for the work or the collection
that contains it, and the Related Web Resources searches for
additional information outside the Wilson database using SFX. A
Thesaurus search on "evolution" produces nine hits, including one
for Inherit the Wind. Clicking on Related Web Resources enabled us
to find ample additional material on the web, although we quickly
came to appreciate the value of refining the search so as to
eliminate the many SparkNotes hits.
In Advanced Search mode-below the pair of radio
buttons that let the searcher choose between Search for a play and
Search for a book-the user sees a template designed for searching by
Play Title, Play Author, Subject, and Keyword in any combination,
along with a pull-down menu for searching by Genre. Additional
pull-downs allow the searcher to specify the number of Male and
Female Cast members or the size of the Total Cast. Checkboxes enable
limiting to works suitable for Grades PreK-6, Grades 7-12, or Adult
performers. Advanced Search, in other words, allows you to craft a
search that meets your needs precisely within the limits of the type
and scale of production you are capable of mounting.
The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT are
supported, along with truncation and wildcards. Placing search terms
within quotation marks treats them as a bound phrase, and
WilsonWeb's relational operators allow the searcher to set the
distance between terms and their word order. The stemming capability
locates variants for the specific search terms entered. Results may
be printed, emailed, and saved.
Price: Consult the company for pricing
information. Librarians may request a free 30-day trial.
Who Needs It? Play Index is geared primarily
toward the school market, from PreK through high school and beyond,
and to anybody in the business of putting on plays, including
theater companies, directors, and individual performers. Play Index
is lean and efficient, and although it does take advantage of SFX's
external linking capabilities, it's not very frilly. It does
everything it purports to do, however, and in terms of providing an
accurate and reliable method for identifying and locating plays that
fit into the thematic interests and production restrictions of its
users, Play Index is a box office smash.
Review from: Choice, June 2006
Long a staple for librarians and serious scholars,
Play Index, in its new online incarnation, continues the fine
quality and versatility of the printed version but also adds many
options. One may search the entire database of 30,000 plays from
1949 to the present for an author, title, or subject without having
to consult multiple print volumes. Or one may search efficiently by
cast analysis (e.g., all plays with one woman, one man; or two women
and one man) or by genre (e.g., comedy, melodrama, radio plays,
television plays, mystery and detective plays). The power of online
searching allows combinations of multiple factors in the advanced
searching mode, and permits simultaneous searches of other Wilson
indexes. For instance, one could search for comedies with a cast of
two men and two women, appropriate for grades 7-12; or search for
all items with a particular subject heading or keyword in both
Play Index and another Wilson index covering education, science,
or art; or search for all plays with a particular word in the title.
Moreover, one can link to the full text of plays available on the
Web, or use the SFX technology-powered WilsonLink to search quickly
for related items both in one's own library's electronic collection
of indexes, and within the Web.
As with the print volumes, full bibliographic
information is available for the books that contain particular
plays. Useful short plot summaries are offered. The summaries alone
make for interesting research. For instance, if one asks for all
plays with the subject heading "incest," one can quickly see the
history of depictions of incest in drama by scanning the 49 entries
that come up. (An important caveat: Play Index covers
materials in English only, but these do include translations of
plays from other languages into English, so the classics of other
languages are well represented.) Seeing what subjects occur in,
e.g., plays appropriate for grades preK-6, or in plays written
expressly for television, would be interesting. Entries can be
marked, e-mailed, and exported into bibliographies. Access to
bibliographic information for plays included in collections (as well
as plays published separately) continues, in this online version, to
be a key benefit. Searching can also be limited by, e.g., ISBN
number, publication year, and series. In short, Play Index
online is a value-added tool that would be well worth its annual
price in libraries supporting serious theater research; it could be
of immense value to teachers and performers looking for plays that
meet particular criteria. Students could benefit by quickly
narrowing in on plays that deal with certain subjects, and by
locating printed versions of specific plays.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.
Review from:
Booklist, April 15, 2006 Wilson has added
Play Index to its suite of databases. Long a staple of the
reference collection in print, Play Index is an aid to
finding plays published in anthologies and collections as well as
individually. The online version contains all 10 volumes of the
print index and offers citations to 30,000 plays published from 1949
to the present. Librarians at institutions that
subscribe to other WilsonWeb databases will already be familiar with
the search types: Basic, Advanced, and Browse. Basic Search
automatically includes Wilson's rules-based All-Smart Search, and
users can enter terms or do a more structured Boolean search. We
entered The Importance of Being Earnest and found brief
citations for 7 plays (including musical versions and adaptations),
which, when we clicked on one of them, were all converted to long
citations showing play title, author, a brief abstract, number of
acts and scenes, makeup of the cast (numbers of male and female
roles and whether there are extras), and subject headings. Oscar
Wilde's name is hyperlinked to citations for more of his plays, and
the subject headings are hyperlinked to citations for other plays
that are assigned the same headings. A "Find This Play in a Book"
link took us to the book record screen listing of collections in
which The Importance of Being Earnest is anthologized. For
these, the full citation displays play title, author, source,
publisher and publication year of source, document type (frequently
"book parts"), and a link to the play record. From the Basic Search
screen, users can elect to skip the title results page and go
straight to book records. In Advanced Search, the
user can do field searches for plays. Fields include Title, Author,
Subject, Keyword, and Genre (melodramas, musicals, pantomimes,
etc.). Additional choices are searching by number of male and female
cast members or total cast members and by level (preschool-grade 6,
grades 7-12, and adult). One can find, for example, one-act plays
with three female and two male characters, suitable for grades 7 to
12. There is also an option in Advanced Search for searching for a
book. Browse allows searching by play author, document type,
subject, and other categories. Besides the power of
electronic searching, Play Index offers several other
advantages not found in the print version. It includes newer
records, some as recent as 2005, while the latest volume of the
print version has coverage through 2002. Also, it links to full
texts of plays available on the Web. A bit simpler to use than some
of Wilson's other databases, it should be valuable in school as well
as public and academic libraries.
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