Research Guides: PAL Research Guide: Home

Welcome to PAL

If you would like to schedule a time to chat with PAL Librarians or Staff to discuss your research for a class, or to work to find a play or musical work, please email us at palref@roosevelt.edu. You can also come to the Performing Arts Library at any time to chat with us or

Book a time to meet with the Performing Arts Librarian!

New to RU? Check out this handy list of RU Library Facts!

The Roosevelt University Performing Arts Library features one of the best academic music and theatre collections in Illinois. The Library and listening center offers over ninety thousand volumes including books, scores, recordings, video and numerous databases.

Strengths include history and performance practice of Western art music, contemporary music and jazz studies. The library also owns many critically edited complete works sets of individual composers and collections. Currently, the library carries over 100 periodical subscriptions both electronic and in print, and has complete runs of several important music and theatre journals.

Check out all the journals RU has to offer here and search our performing arts library catalog here.

The Performing Arts Library archives contain many historically important documents, rare books, scores and sound recordings. In addition, the archives hold extensive material relating to the music school dating to its origins in the 19^th century, including papers and large audio archives of Rudolph Ganz.

PAL Tutorials Page
Click here for video explanations of many of our databases!
BabelScores
BabelScores is the world’s new showcase for contemporary music and a powerful tool for present-day composers to promote their work and to receive a fair benefit for it.
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Requires VPN for access.
Musical Online Scores Library
Music Online: Classical Scores Library is a reliable and authoritative destination for in-copyright digital scores of the classical canon, as well as a resource for the discovery of diverse and lesser-known contemporary works. This five-volume collection encompasses all major classical musical genres and time periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century and includes full, study, piano, and vocal scores.
Musiconn
The musiconn search draws on 18 data sources for music and offers comprehensive search options in over 5.5 million individual entries.

Eastman Case Studies This link opens in a new window
**THIS RESOURCE IS ON CAMPUS ONLY**
IPA Source (International Phonetic Alphabet) This link opens in a new window
Online since 2003, IPA Source is the web's largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Now with over 4930 texts including 810 aria texts.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides students with exposure to peer reviewed scholarly research with a reference resource of over 1,500 academic journals and other content.
New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window
The New Play Exchange®, a National New Play Network project, is the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers. Designed and built with the needs of the entire new play sector in mind, the mission of the New Play Exchange® is to provide an open, egalitarian platform on which writers all over the world can share their work and others can discover that work.
Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Access to articles, biographies, bibliographies, 20th century composers and performers, world music, jazz, opera, rock, popular music, instruments and their history.
Limited concurrent user access. Be sure to log off when finished your searching so that other authorized users can access it. If unable to connect, please try again at a later time.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1963 and contains over 2.3 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 book publishers.

PAL Tutorials Page
Click here for video explanations of many of our databases!

Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
Listen over the web to the complete recordings found in the Naxos catalog. The catalog includes all recordings by Marco Polo, Dacapo, and First Edition. Naxos is the leader in the classical recording industry.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
This award-winning digital library has been created as a response to the need for a high-quality online research tool for drama and literature students, professors, and teachers. It is the only resource to combine exclusively available playtext content and scholarly publications with filmed live performances, film adaptations, and audio plays.
Medici.tv This link opens in a new window
The world’s leading classical music channel, medici.tv’s on-demand streaming platform boasts the largest online catalog of over 1,800 videos including concerts, ballets, operas, documentaries, master classes, behind-the-scenes footage and artist interviews. Each year, a selection of exclusive events are broadcast live from the world’s most prestigious concert halls, opera houses, festivals, and competitions, then available afterwards on replay.
Alexander Street Press This link opens in a new window
Streaming video content covering many subject disciplines, such as American History, Environmental Studies, Black Studies, Current Affairs, Counseling & Therapy, Opera, New World Cinema (Independent Features & Shorts), and Theatre. Click the 'Collections" tab to discover videos for which the library provides access.
Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window
Streaming Broadway productions, interviews, and study guides.
Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window
Academic Video Online makes video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, and more.
Met On Demand This link opens in a new window
This new experience of the Met Opera on Demand service offers extraordinary access to unforgettable opera performances, captured live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and spanning more than 75 years of the company’s unparalleled broadcast history.

CARLI Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Digital representations of myriad special collections from colleges and universities in the state of Illinois including printed and manuscript materials, images, and sound recordings. Includes collections in education, history, sociology, African American studies, religion, performing arts, and more.

IMSLP
The ultimate goal of the IMSLP is to gather all public domain music scores, in addition to the music scores of all contemporary composers (or their estates) who wish to release them to the public free of charge. However, another main goal of IMSLP is to facilitate the exchange of musical ideas outside of compositions: for example, the analysis of a particular piece of music.
NYPL Digital Theatre Collections
Digital images covering theatre from photos to ephemera and video
Performing Arts Library of Congress Digital Collections
Among collections are the Aaron Copland Collection, Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev, the Ernest Bloch Collection.
German Digital LIbrary
Paintings, books, pieces of music, films, photographs, files, manuscripts and much more: research, download, share German cultural heritage.
Archives Hub
Use the Archives Hub to find unique sources for your research, both physical and digital. Search across descriptions of archives, held at over 390 institutions across the UK.
Hathi Trust
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables large-scale analysis of works in the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) to facilitate non-profit research and educational uses of the collection. HTRC, which is co-located at Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, engages in research and development for text analysis of massive digital libraries.
Trove
Search Trove to explore amazing collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. It’s free and available online all day, every day.
Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its partners. Online since 1997, it is enriched with thousands of new items every week and today offers access to several million documents.
The European Library
The European Library is designed to meet the needs of the research community worldwide, our online portal offers quick and easy access to the collections of the 48 National Libraries of Europe and leading European Research Libraries.
Center for Research Libraries
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries. Founded in 1949, CRL supports original research and inspired teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by preserving and making available to scholars a wealth of rare and uncommon primary source materials from all world regions.

Research Assistance

Email your performing arts librarian a research question!

Disability Services
Disability Services (DS) is a branch of the Learning Commons (LC). Our team is committed to providing students with disabilities with the necessary services to support their participation in the rich and varied life of Roosevelt University.
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Auditions in Chicago
Theatre In Chicago is a free resources that actors can use to look for auditions in the area!
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You can also sign up for a daily email with new notices!
Blank Sheet Music
PDF blank sheet music files in almost any kind of staff you'd need!
RU Disability Services
Disability Services (DS) is a branch of the Learning Commons (LC). Our team is committed to providing students with disabilities with the necessary services to support their participation in the rich and varied life of Roosevelt University.
Pal Topic Guides
This is a splash page that houses all guides written by PAL Librarians on a variety of topics including Musical Theatre and Theatre Guides, Instrument Guides and more!
Online Resources for Music Scholars
Links to over 300 sites, chosen by staff of Harvard University Library.

PAL Research Guide

Guides By PAL

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Performing Arts Library

Welcome to PAL

New to RU? Check out this handy list of RU Library Facts!

Research Assistance

PAL Hours

Select Helpful Internet Links