Funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as the British Academy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT) database currently contains records pertaining to eight historic theatres north of the Thames river (the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), the Fortune (1600), the Red Bull (1604), the Boar's Head (1602), the Phoenix or Cockpit (1616), and Salisbury Court (1629)). In addition, the database will soon be updated with records for other theatres, including the Bankside theatres in Surrey.
One might expect to find primary information about the performances at these theatres, but this is not EMLoT's purpose. As stated in its description, it “lets you see what direct use has been made […] of pre‐1642 documents related to professional performance […] it charts the copies (or “transcriptions”) […] it tells you who used them, and when, and where you can find evidence of that use”. For those seeking more detailed information about the performances or the text of plays, The Records of Early English Drama (www.reed.utoronto.ca/index.html) at the University of Toronto (one of the partners, along with King's College Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Southampton) is currently in the process of compiling and editing this information, and will be making it available, in both print and online, when that project is completed. It could be argued that this project should have taken priority over that pursued by EMLoT, or at least be pursued simultaneously for a single or interconnected database; it is severely limiting to restrict the information only to historical occurrences recorded before 1642 and then copied by others after this date, as this database has done. It attempts to justify this through a thorough introductory section that should be read before attempting to utilize the database, and it does make clear that the primary function here is to show “how information produced at the time of the early London threatres was transmitted in later years”, not to provide as much primary information as possible for research on early London theatres. The site does mention other sources where this type of information can be found.
EMLoT provides a fairly comprehensive help section which gives useful tips on how to search, as well as the types of records to be found in the database and how best to navigate them. There are two basic search methodologies offered: the typical keyword search, and a faceted search. Keyword searching can be limited by the type of record sought: primary sources, secondary sources, people, events, troupes, or venues, with the default being set to primary sources. The Boolean default for this search is an OR, so users must employ quotations if they wish to search for phrases or proper Christian plus last names. Search results are helpfully returned as a list with tabbed layout, so one need not perform different searches for each category; one can tab through. The lists provide the item's author, title, full title, date, and the repository where the original can be found. The lists do not provide what would be extremely helpful: links to digitized copies of these documents.
The faceted search, by contrast, appears to be a fancy name for narrowing by browse. Starting with broad categories (description, citation, event and person, troupe and venue, and dates), the user can expand each with submenus into its constituent “elements”, with the number of elements per facet being designated next to each. These are basically authority records, designated by EMLoT.
One more search option is provided: a “record” search. Clicking on this tab provides an extensive list of the most popular search items, divided by type (e.g. people) and is an interesting search to browse (e.g. “Burbage and Brayne are indicted for illicit and violent assemblies at the Theatre”), but given the sheer amount of links here, perhaps the only three truly useful sections are those with people's names, the troupes, and venues, since they are relatively short and arranged alphabetically. One could use one's browser Find feature to try to identify specific terms from the links under Documents and Events, but otherwise, the amount of information is too much to wade through.
The records themselves provide an abstract and are extensively interlinked: any other related records under any category are included (e.g. an event record for “Burbage vs Allen” also links to records for the Theatre and the names of all the people involved, such as James Burbage). Links out to theatre patron records in Records of Early English Drama are also included. It is important to remember that EMLoT is basically an online catalogue – unlike digitization projects, this is simply a catalogue of the original objects plus records of their later transcriptions, not the text of the objects or transcriptions themselves.
For those who wish to register with the site, there are some additional features. The Work Space section of the site provides registered users with a place to store and organize the records they find from their searching and browsing. Items added to the workspace can be organized, filtered, or added to user‐created “collections” which can be shared (“published”) with others by emailing a link. A Learning Zone offers a tutorial which attempts to demonstrate how “historical meaning can be made from the resources included in the database”, and uses the Shrove Tuesday apprentice riots of 1616 as example. Other learning activities aimed at students and teachers are also included under a separate tab, as well as a list of related sites (the Records of Early English Drama Patrons and Performances web site among them).
The layout of the site is well done, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate. All search features work well, returning appropriate records. The indexing for each record, for sheer number of included tags, is remarkable. For all this, however, the site is lacking in usability due to the limitations of the project's scope. EMLoT takes great pains to provide the user with much explanatory material justifying exactly how it is useful, but methinks it doth protest too much. An impressive amount of work has gone into this project, and it is ongoing, but the extra step to include more primary materials (regardless of later transcription) and digitize the actual materials included in the catalogue to give users fingertip access to them would have greatly added to this resource's value. In its defence, the site's scope is clearly defined and this is outside of it; it also includes abstracts with each record, some of which are detailed enough to give the user a good idea of the original item's content.
