Search tips

You can search the Scottish Theatre Programmes database:

• By names of shows, companies or venues
• By keyword or phrase only – not by combinations of keywords (i.e. not Boolean searches).
• Without capital letters. It makes no difference to the results.

Keyword/phrase searches will only find exact matches.

You don't need to use:

• Initial articles – ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ – at the start of a title
• Diacritic marks – accents, umlauts, etc. We do not include them in the database.

Improve your results

The database records include the information as it appears on the programme, and this can vary considerably for the same show, company etc.

If you can’t find what you're looking for, or to be sure that you have found all the relevant records, try the following searches:

• Replace ‘&’ with ‘and’ and vice versa, e.g. “Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat”, “Joseph & his amazing technicolor dreamcoat”
• Search for terms that include numbers as both words and figures, e.g. “Mass for 3 voices”, “Mass for three voices”
• Search for common variations in spellings of foreign names, e.g. “Rachmaninov”, “Rachmaninoff”
• Search for abbreviated and full versions of titles, e.g. “Dr Faustus”, “Doctor Faustus”
• Search using hyphenated and unhyphenated forms of words, e.g. “To-morrow’s child”, “Tomorrow’s child”; “Half-past eight”, “Half past eight”
• Search for different forms of a year or range of years (in titles), e.g. “1978-79”, “1978-1979”, “78-79”.
• Search with and without punctuation, such as:
  • Full stops after abbreviations, e.g. “Goodnight, Mrs. Puffin”, “Goodnight, Mrs Puffin”
  • Apostrophes, e.g. “Abigail's party”, “Abigails party”
  • Quotation marks within titles, e.g. “Who killed Agatha Christie”, “Who killed ‘Agatha’ Christie”

Touring productions

If we have received a programme for a touring show from a particular theatre, we will enter it in the database under that theatre.

If we don’t know where a programme came from, but it lists tour dates/venues, we will use the first Scottish venue on the list.

Shelfmarks

If the shelfmark is not listed in the Scottish Theatre Programmes database, it can be obtained by checking the Library catalogue under the performance venue to locate the record for the collection, e.g. King's Theatre Edinburgh programmes, playbills, posters, etc. Items may be placed at multiple locations according to size, therefore if requesting a particular year, more than one order may be required for each shelfmark.