H.W. Wilson Company has finally produced an online version of their well‐known print source Play Index. This series of bound indexes, first produced in 1949, may now be accessed via one web‐based interface. For users searching for plays by cast, topic, or genre, the online version will be a great time‐saver.
The online index is valuable from the onset because it contains current year plays along with the older materials; in contrast, the last print volume covers up to 2002 year plays. Nevertheless, the index is not exhaustive: The Producers and Once Upon a Mattress, for instance, are not found. About 30,000 plays, 99 percent in English (including plays translated from other languages), are indexed: over 20,000 books and over 17,000 plays as parts of books. About 4,200 plays are listed for K‐6 casts, 1,500 for 7‐12 grade casts, and the rest for adult; some plays are condensed or adapted versions (e.g. for school casts).
The “major book record” includes full citation, and sometimes gives summary and cast information. The user can customize the display along a couple dimensions: length of entry, extensive sorting fields, number of entries per page. Another useful feature is the hyperlinked text so one can easily move from an entry found by author search to a list of plays with the same subject. The entry also hyperlinks to find the specific play within different books (e.g. anthologies). Wilson also provides a hyperlink to several web resources (e.g. Wikipedia, Bartleby's, Gutenberg Project, literature and school sites), the results therein reflecting the information in those sites. Thus, for well‐established plays, such as Uncle Vanya, the “hits” provide valuable information. Lesser known, recent plays may generate disappointing files (e.g. the play Defiled generated Biblical quotations that didn't fit closely with the play). Key words are not highlighted in the web resources.
The interface consists of two navigation sets: the frame on the left includes search, browse (which is quite good for subject searches), thesaurus (which is really a keyword index), and print/e‐mail/save. A help button gives directions for Wilson Web products in general; the journal directory is misleading since Play Index does not include journals per se. The bottom navigation bar changes, depending on which searching mode is being used.
As with many other online databases, Play Index has two major modes: basic and advanced search. The basic, one‐liner approach can result in disappointingly few listings if one does not check the Book Records box. It treats a set of words as phrases, and can handle Boolean terms. The advanced search enables one to access information by title, author, subject, author, genre (e.g. farce, one‐act, puppets, pantomime, mysteries and miracle versus mystery and detective, worship program, tragedy, etc.), cast (gender and number), and age (K‐6, 7‐12, adult). It would have been useful to have “date” as a search option. Searching and results can combine terms for more targeted lists. It should be noted that different search strategies generate different results; for instance, the play Defiled does not include libraries or librarians as subject terms (which it should), but it does appear when one searches under the browser mode using the term “librarians”. The result list has check boxes, which enables the combination of selected entries based upon need.
Some limitations exist in this index. For instance, the search term “middle ages” will not generate a list of miracle plays, although the term “medieval” will so do. Sometimes a search term generates a list that does not explicitly include the search term (e.g. York plays does not use the term “libraries” although that was the search term). It appears that the index is providing the infrastructure for rich data mining, but some of the details need to be ironed out.
An annual subscription to Play Index starts at $745 for public and academic libraries, based on one simultaneous user. Pricing is also available for additional users, or for an unlimited site license. An annual subscription for K‐12 school libraries starts at $560.
In sum, Play Index provides a fine one‐stop searching tool for finding plays. The aware searcher can use a variety of approaches to compensate for uneven indexing (which in itself is unusual for a Wilson publication). It appears that Wilson has established an infrastructure that will be able to accommodate sophisticated searching approaches such as language and physical description. While the product is not finished, it is still a useful acquisition. Who wants to go back to the multiple black print volumes?
