EDWARD MULLALY
HEATHER McCALLUM and RUTH PINCOE, comps. Directory of Canadian Theatre Archives. Halifax: Occasional Paper Series, School of Library and Information Studies, Dalhousie University, 1992. x, 217pp.
CHES SKINNER and JUDY CONINE. Alberta Theatre Performance Calendar: 1885 - 1990. Internet publication at http://home.uleth.ca/sfa-apc/ , 1997.
These two research tools are much alike in that they present detailed explorations of primary Canadian materials. Yet they are also worlds apart. One stretches broadly across historical holdings from coast to coast. The other stays in one province and burrows narrowly but deeply into its own theatrical past. One is bound by the physical pages which define its existence. The other might be said to lack existence, in that it survives only as long as its binary world is invoked on the Internet. One is a passive source of knowledge. The other demands the active involvement of the seeker in the shaping of the information it divulges. The Directory has the information only in print form; the Alberta Project page itself doesn't offer the option of printing out search results (although your web browser can probably do it for you). The Directory is important for what it contains. The Alberta project is significant both for what it contains and also for being the first Canadian performance calendar published only on the Internet.
The SSHRC-funded Directory of Canadian Theatre Archives (1992) is part of the Occasional Paper Series of Dalhousie University's School of Library and Information Studies, and it is intended as an "enlarged edition" of the National Library's 1973 Theatre Resources in Canadian Collections. The Directory's compilers queried the theatrical holdings of over four hundred archives, libraries, museums, and local history collections. Their response was sufficiently large to forbid inclusion of dance and opera collections, fringe festival materials (though not necessarily materials of the performing groups), and more recent amateur groups. The bulk of this invaluable material (160 pages) succinctly and precisely describes theatrical archives, papers, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and memorabilia held at various public sites, province by province, from one end of Canada to the other. Appendices include thumbnail descriptions of private collections, a survey of CBC holdings, and a bibliography of books and pamphlets chronicling Canadian theatre. The volume ends with an extremely useful and comprehensive index. In their Introduction, Heather McCallum and Ruth Pincoe modestly point out the weaknesses of their compilation. Rather, they should revel in the inclusiveness of this essential reference tool.
The Alberta Theatre Performance Calendar, located on the Internet at http://home.uleth.ca/sfa-apc/, provides a searchable data base of over 12,000 theatrical records drawn from the Lethbridge, Red Deer, and Medicine Hat newspapers between 1885 and 1990. The site also includes a help page which outlines the data base structure and a list of the newspapers covered. One of the strengths of a text-based search engine such as that used by the ATPC is that if given a particular word (name, place, title, etc.) it will search throughout entire entries; thus it will come up with any production in which a given individual might have been an actor, or director, or manager, or even have the same name as a character in a play. Also, it will find entries if given only a partial reference the "Yates Centre" will also provide performance data for the "Yates Memorial Centre."
The calendar shows the effects of some haste. The proofreading could have been better. Curious notations at the ends of some entries ( "Previous // Search") are meaningless. And I'm not sure why the file entry number appears at the end of some entries. The program is unable to search on its single-character "status" field and thus cannot distinguish "amateur" from "professional" productions. Also, the database algorithm for a straightforward search of "Shakespeare" gives a particular Julius Caesar performance an 84% "confidence probability" in one place while a similar entry for a different performance of the same play gets a confidence rating of only 56%; when this latter performance is identified through a "Julius Caesar" search, the performance calendar's confidence level rises to 82% for the production previously given a 56%. The confusing algorithm which leads to these varying figures is, presumably, the proprietary property of the askSam data base program or the Excite search engine used in this project and is far beyond the control of those involved at the Alberta site.
Should researchers choose to group searches by "subject" rather than "confidence," the methodology behind the resultant groupings is puzzling. Staying with the same Julius Caesar data, "Group One" in a subject search contains references to various Julius Caesar productions. But the heading for "Group Two" reads "1918, chautauqua, ag, jy, kaffir," and the two entries in the section are unhelpfully titled "11348.htm" and "5772.htm." The other groupings also have puzzling section titles that would have benefitted from explanation somewhere on the home page. Such gremlins illustrate the unfortunate truth that electronic search engines are still in their early days.
Despite these annoyances, the groundbreaking achievement of Canada's first electronic performance calendar is to be celebrated. A researcher tracing a particular touring company, a biographer researching a particular actor, or a cultural historian exploring a particular town or city will find the search possibilities of this site invaluable. As search programs become more sophisticated in their ability to handle material in a variety of formats, and as researchers become more familiar with the limits of various data base engines, the Internet will become a prime site for research publication. In contrast to print-based projects such as the Directory of Canadian Theatre Archives, which had to be totally finished before any of its valuable information could be published, large binary projects need not be entirely completed before research is shared. The Alberta Performance Calendar can be enlarged at some future date to include the newspapers of Calgary and Edmonton by simply adding data to the existing site. Mistakes in the performance calendar can be readily corrected. Should Heather McCallum or Ruth Pincoe discover one or two further sites of extreme importance, the Directory could not be so easily upgraded. As Heather McCallum writes, "A Directory such as this is happily out of date on publication." An electronic data base need not be.
The ATPC's significance becomes more obvious in its Internet context. Drama on the WWW is daily delivering more and more international sites to one's fingertips. http://www.oden.se/~pferm/gravel.htm advertises itself as having the most complete collection of pages on dramatists on the Web. A site of theatre and radio drama, it offers hundreds of links to magazines, libraries, bookstores, and publishers, and it has city by city, country by country lists of links. Scotts Theatre Links at http://www.theatre-link.com/ advertises itself as a complete guide to all aspects of theatre on the Net. Martindales' "Reference Desk" at http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/Ref4.html#IE4 also provides a page of links to theatre links worldwide. Indices to other theatre indices are kept updated at Gutenberg University's http://fb14.uni-mainz.de/litlink/speccat/drama.htm . The WWW Virtual Library has an international drama links site at http://www.brookes.ac.uk/VL/theatre/index.htm . Web sites, a number of electronic theatrical journals, and common search engines are linked at the Atkin's Library drama page: http://www.uncc.edu/lis/library/reference/human/theater.htm . The U.K. Theatre Web, http://www.uktw.co.uk/ is more focused on happenings in Britain (although it has links to the United States, Canada, and Europe). The Britannia Theatre Guides and Web sites page is at http://www.britannia.com/theatre/thea.html . The British What's On Stage site includes both theatrical and musical upcoming events: http://www.whatson.com/stage/ . The English Server has a large site specializing in complete dramatic texts: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/drama/ . (The Dramatic Exchange offers recent scripts at http://www.dramex.org/ .) The AltaVista search engine's word count for "Shakespeare," 160,082, provides a prime example of information overload. The Royal Shakespeare Company site, http://www.hiway.co.uk/~ei/rscan.html , offers a textual search through his plays. Other sites offer the full texts themselves. Search them out using a metasearch engine such as MetaCrawler at http://www.metacrawler.com , MegaSearch at http://www.mlx.net/megasrch/index.html , or the less well known Open Text Index at http://index.opentext.com/ (where a search of "canada and theatre" produced 4683 pages).
In the Canadian context, one of the most inclusive sites for those interested in Canadian theatre is Fred Kern's evolving page at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~fkern/sites.htm. http://www.ffa.ucalgary.ca/indexen.html advertises itself as a "World Wide Web window on Canadian Culture" and includes links to much of Canada's theatrical community. Other well-known sites include CanDrama at http://www.unb.ca/web/english/candrama/candrama.htm and Theatre Research In Canada at http://www.unb.ca/web/english/tric/triconts.htm . One example of a more focused Canadian site is the Records of Early English Drama location, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~reed/reed.html, which offers theatre and music links in its particular area of interest, as well as much information on the project itself. A specifically Canadian location is the Playwrights Union script and information site at http://www.puc.ca/. The easiest way to find a particular Canadian WWW theatrical location is to use one of the larger search engines mentioned above.
Most of these addresses share with the Alberta site the ability to explore data in patterns defined by the inquirer in contrast to the Directory's methodology which allows researchers to search their areas of interest in a manner predefined, or at least shaped, by the compilers' geographical formatting and index. Where the Alberta project stands apart from the plethora of other WWW sites is in the fact that it is the first to offer a searchable performance calendar for a particular time and place. The obvious step now is for other researchers who have computerized performance calendars in text or data base form to make them available similarly. The advantages of producing this sort of research on the Internet rather than on the page are too apparent to labor further.