Databases

JSTOR provides access to a digital archive of journals in the areas of Arts, Business, Economics, and Sciences. JSTOR includes the entire runs of these journals, from the very first issue to the volumes published a few years ago. With a small number of exceptions - the "Current Scholarship" titles - JSTOR is a backfile collection and excludes the most recent issues (as part of the terms of the agreement with the journal publishers).

Includes materials ranging from texts, letters, periodicals, speeches, interviews, and ephemera covering LGBT political, social and cultural movements to memoirs, biographies, poetry, and works of fiction that provide insight into the lives of lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community. Content partners include the Kinsey Institute Archive and Library, Windy City Media Group, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive, and notable LGBT publishers Alyson Books, Cleis Press, and Firebrand Books as well as mainstream trade and university publishers.

Provides detailed information on over 6,000 journals and book series that cover literature, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, language, linguistics, pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and the history of printing and publishing. It serves as a resource for scholars seeking outlets to publish their work, providing information on topics covered, editorial policies, contact information, and submission guidelines.  Articles published in works listed in the directory are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Includes over 2 million citations covering literature, language, film, linguistics and folklore. Provides access to scholarly articles in over 4,400 journals; also covers relevant books, dissertations, working papers, proceedings and bibliographies. The database also has an identifiable subset of more than 77,000 records that constitute the JSTOR subfile. This consists of citation records for documents in JSTOR's Language and Literature Collection. The documents date back as far as 1881 and contain direct links to the full-text articles on the JSTOR website.

Features streaming videos of films, clips and trailers from the National Film Board (NFB) collection, including NFB world-renowned documentaries, films that chronicle key moments in the lives of Canadians and works that take a stand on issues of global importance: the environment, human rights, international conflict and more. It also contains acclaimed Canadian dramatic features, documentaries, animated films, and experimental works.

High definition streaming video of 50 National Theatre Live (U.K.) broadcasts, with notable productions of Shakespeare, as well as recordings never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive. The database also includes exclusive digitized archival materials such as prompt scripts, costume designs, and more are available to provide behind-the-scenes background and contextual information.

An archival collection comprising the backfiles of 15 major magazines (including Newsweek), spanning areas such as current events, international relations, and public policy. The titles offer multiple perspectives on the contemporary contexts of the major events, trends, and interests in these fields throughout the twentieth century.

Combining features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, the Bibliographies identify the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.  McMaster subscribes to the following subjects:  African American Studies (New), Anthropology, Atlantic History (New), Biblical Studies, Geography, International Relations, Jewish Studies, Literary & Cultural Theory, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.

Widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language, the OED is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. It includes present-day meanings, along with the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

Provides scholarly review articles summarizing current thinking and research in a range of subjects across the humanaities, social sciences, and sciences.  Each handbook offers in-depth introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship.  McMaster's access has expanded to include all 1200 Handbooks.

Provides the text of over 170 plays originally published by Playwrights Canada Press after 1984.  While located in Ontario, the Press is proud of its list of published playwrights that stretches from Newfoundland to British Columbia and the Yukon. Playwrights Canada Press also publishes French plays by Canadian authors in English translation, and includes theatre for young audiences.

Cross-search over 50 indexing, abstracting, and full-text databases in a range of subjects.

Indexes over 4 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses completed at colleges and universities worldwide. 

A series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period.

Discover the creative decisions made by directors and designers at the world-renowned Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and its predecessor, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company. Explore how the works of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and other playwrights have been adapted, interpreted, presented and understood since the early twentieth century. Chart performance history through more than 1,400 prompt books, complemented by photographs, original designs, sheet music and production records for its most innovative productions.

Includes over 40 high-definition online videos of William Shakespeare’s plays featuring the world’s best Shakespearean actors, like David Tennant, Sir Antony Sher, Paapa Essiedu, and Simon Russell Beale, and directors like Robin Lough and Dewi Humphrey. Contains The Tempest, King Lear, Hamlet and other famous performances filmed at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon theater between 2013 to 2017. 

Contains information on the full range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods for the social and behavioral sciences, as well as many methods commonly used in the hard sciences, pulled from over 750 handbooks, encyclopedias, and journal articles. Supports researchers in every step of a research project, from writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to writing up and publishing the findings.

Contains over 50 million articles from over 23,000 full text journals covering many disciplines.

Located in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, the Stratford Festival is the largest classical repertory theatre company in North America. Each season, they present a dozen or more productions in different venues. This collection from Drama Online now offers 14 filmed performances.

Contains more than 250 plays and over 100 video documentaries available online in streaming video. Authors include include Aeschylus, Anderson, Chekov, Cocteau, Garcia Lorca, Genet, Jarry, Moliere, Racine, Shakespeare, Shaw, Sheridan, Voltaire, and more, in productions from the 1930's to the present.

Our subscription provides 8 concurrent users for video streams. When a user starts streaming a video the system takes away one video stream slot from the pool. If the user pauses or stops playing the video the steaming slot is returned to the general pool for other users.

Volume I covers major works from North America and Europe, beginning with the first underground comix from the 1950s and continuing through to modern sequential artists. The collection contextualizes these original works with 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.
Volume II expands on Volume I by providing an additional 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find works, scholarly writings, and more. Volume II adds extensive coverage of the pre-Comics Code era horror, crime, romance, and war comics that fueled the backlash leading to one of the largest censorship campaigns in US history. It also contains tens of thousands of pages of non-mainstream, post-code comics and secondary materials from around the world, including the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan, and more.

WorldCat is the world's largest library catalogue, merging the holdings of over 72,000 institutions worldwide. Includes records for books, journals, maps, recordings, films, scores, and other materials located in public, academic, corporate, school and specialized libraries all over the world. McMaster's holdings will be listed first. Items not in our library can be requested via Interlibrary Loans.

Includes nine periodicals spanning 1940-2020, highlighting topics and trends of youth culture like fashion, rock and roll, sexuality and dating, as well as youth portrayal in the media. At completion, this collection will have 200,000 pages from periodicals published in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Most of the periodicals within the collection are difficult to find and no longer published, such as Clarity Magazine from the 1940s and Petticoat from the 1960s, providing insight to the various content that influenced youth culture throughout the decades.