Contents:

1. Searching with personal names
2. Searching with Institution names, Theatre names or other keywords
3. The records held on Backstage

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Searching with personal names

To search Backstage for names of people such as actors, directors, designers and so on, use the first form on the search page.

Here you can type in the last name and first name of the person. Please note that you can search with the last name only if you wish.

Having entered the names, the system then constructs a query for you, and searches with the names formatted as a number of variant phrases combined using the boolean OR operator, e.g.:

(jones_inigo or inigo_jones or i_jones or jones_i)

The search looks for occurrences of these phrases appearing anywhere in the record, and is designed to compensate for the variant ways in which names are cited within the various Backstage records.

(The records come from a number of disparate sources with varying but equally valid cataloguing rules applied.)

You are also given the facility to limit your search to records of a particular type by choosing from the drop-down menu.

Searching with Institution names, Theatre names or other keywords

The second option is to search with other names or keywords. Here you have more flexibility than in the personal name search.

You have the option to treat your query terms either as a single phrase, or have the system search the database treating your query as a set of individual terms combined using the boolean operators AND, OR & NOT.

By default your query is treated as a phrase. So Theatre Museum will be considered as if it had been explicitly entered as a phrase search and joined with an underscore:

Theatre_Museum

This will only retrieve records where the words Theatre and Museum appear next to each other anywhere in the record.

You can change this behaviour by clicking and flagging the radio button to treat your phrase as a boolean query. By default terms are combined with boolean AND unless another operator is explicitly stated:

Theatre Museum is treated as Theatre AND Museum

This will retrieve records where both words appear anywhere in the record regardless of whether they appear next to each other or not.

You can explicitly use boolean operators in your queries if you choose the boolean option:

Playbills OR Libretti will retrieve records which contain either one word or the other or both words.

N.B. Gilbert and Sullivan is treated as a phrase by default i.e. only records containing the three consecutive words will be retrieved. This is the same as if you explicitly entered these terms as a phrase joined with underscores:

Gilbert_and_Sullivan

If you choose the boolean option however, the middle word will be treated as the boolean AND connector and records will be retrieved where both terms appear anywhere in the record.

Note that you can build boolean queries containing phrases by explicitly joining them with underscores and then selecting the boolean option:

Gilbert_and_Sullivan OR HMS_Pinafore

The records held on Backstage

Backstage contains 3 types of records in a hierarchy of specificity. In other words the record types are related to each other as parents, grandparents and children.

The three record types are Institutional / departmental location records, Collection Level Descriptions and Item level catalogue records.

1. Institutional / departmental location records

   These are bibliographic records describing institutions and their departments who hold collections of performing arts materials. Included in the record are details of how to contact those responsible for maintaining the collections and a summary of holdings of that institution or department. These records constitute the Backstage Directory of Performing Arts Collection Holders.

2. Collection Level Descriptions

   These are bibliographic records describing individual collections held by each institution. There is one record per collection regardless of its size. The format of these records conforms to the RSLP Collection Description Schema and constitutes the first implementation of this new standard.

   Each collection is associated with a location record.

3. Item level catalogue records

   Several Backstage partners are contributing item level records from their own archival catalogues in addition to Collection Level Description, adding a further level of description and richness to the database.

   Each item has an associated Collection Level Description defining the collection it is part of.

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