Theatre and Drama Premium: About

Theatre and Drama Premium is an Alexander Street database for teaching and studying theatre arts and dramatic writing.
Bringing together over 13,500 written plays; 150,000 pages of original designs, reference material, and ephemera; 300 audio plays; and 750 hours of filmed stage performances, documentaries, and video training materials, Theatre and Drama Premium serves both practical and scholarly purposes for theatre arts and literature programs

It provides searchable and browsable access to a variety of theatre arts related materials, including all aspects of theatre and performance. Includes access to full-text plays, audio plays, filmed stage performances, documentaries, and other video content, contextualising materials (designs, reference, and ephemera) including recent Broadway productions and previously unpublished plays. Covers key writers, creators, and performers. Includes full content of the following collections:

Drama Texts Collection
Contemporary World Drama Black Drama:
Third Edition Twentieth Century Drama:
Second Edition Theatre in Performance Collection
The Broadway HD Collection
The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
Theatre in Context Collection
Performance Design Archive Online.

What Is a Database?

A database is a collection of detailed records of different types of publications in a specific area. Publication types might include:

scholarly journals
trade magazines
magazines
newspapers
dissertations
reports
grey literature.

The records usually include:

publication title
article title
authors
keywords (that describe the content of the article)
abstract (a brief summary of the article).

They help you to see what has been published in the area you are studying and can help you with your study and your coursework

Why Should I Use a Database?

Unlike the general web, the content of databases is selected by specialists and is nearly always trustworthy, factual information
They contain a huge number of records and so provide comprehensive coverage of subjects
They are easier to search for the type of information that will be useful to your study and your coursework
They are updated daily
There are lots of customisation options, e.g., save your search history and have new results emailed to you.

ProQuest

Theatre and Drama Premium is a product offered by Alexander Street, who are a part of ProQuest. ProQuest is a large American information provider. ProQuest provides access to content used in teaching, learning and research, including scholarly journals, dissertations, ebooks, newspapers, periodicals, and historical collections.

ProQuest is not a publisher. Instead, it is what is known as an aggregator. Aggregators provide access to content created by publishers. Everything available on ProQuest has been published elsewhere, ProQuest collects material from different publishers and makes it available on one platform. The problem with aggregators, however, is that content can change over time. Publications can go from full text to abstract only to being removed from the platform all together. Hence, there is a small possibility of the content on Theatre and Drama Premium changing over time