LibGuides: Creative Writing: Specialist resources

New resource: Statista

Statista This link opens in a new window
Global data and business intelligence platform, including statistics, reports and insights.

Worldwide reports on a range of industries, including:

For example: UK book industry - statistics & facts (2024)

Drama and playtexts

BBC Shakespeare Archive This link opens in a new window
This site contains programmes and photographs from the BBC's Shakespeare archive.
It includes Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, documentaries, interviews and over a thousand stills of classic Shakespeare productions, as well as entertainment programmes referencing Shakespeare
Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window
Unique full-length films of current leading productions of Shakespeare plays, modern dramas, musicals and adaptations of classic novels.
Drama Online: Nick Hern Books Collection This link opens in a new window
Over 600 modern plays from specialist theatre publisher Nick Hern Books featuring pre-eminent playwrights including Howard Brenton, Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Lucy Kirkwood, Liz Lochhead, Conor McPherson, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Enda Walsh.
Accessibility statement and help

Additional library resources

BFI Player This link opens in a new window
Watch freely available collections from the British Film Institute.
Migration to New Worlds This link opens in a new window
A multi-archive collection that provides a wide-ranging and in-depth look at the movement of peoples from Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and Asia to the New World and Australasia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thousands of unique primary documents are presented from multiple sources, including letter collections, travel journals, diaries and oral histories. English, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish and Scottish migrant experiences are well represented, along with a rich variety of documents covering Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States and indentured labour in the West Indies.

Accessibility statement and help
Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature This link opens in a new window
Access to literature reference works from Wiley Online Library.

This collection contains:

The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660‐1789
The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic
The Encyclopedia of the Novel
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature
Accessibility statement and help

JSTOR Primary Source collections

JSTOR provides access to a wide range of resources as well as the journal articles for which it is best known. You will find these resources through a general search, but you can also search or browse within individual collections. See a full list of primary source collections here

19th Century British Pamphlets 19th Century British Pamphlets, created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), contains the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in research libraries in the United Kingdom. These provide a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.
Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa The liberation of Southern Africa and the dismantling of the Apartheid regime was one of the major political developments of the 20th century, with far-reaching consequences for people throughout Africa and around the globe. This collection focuses on the complex and varied liberation struggles in the region, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It brings together materials from various archives and libraries throughout the world documenting colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and the worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region.
World Heritage Sites: Africa World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning.
Independent Voices Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
American Prison Newspapers On March 24, 1800, Forlorn Hope was published within a prison in New York state, edited by an incarcerated person. In the intervening 200+ years, over 700 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons in all fifty states. American Prison Newspapers will bring together hundreds of these periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women-only institutions.
Student Activism The collection aims to provide access to unique, yet essential, primary sources documenting the deep and broad history of student organizing in the United States. Reveal Digital’s Student Activism collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions.

JSTOR Daily

JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers.

JISC Historical Texts

JISC retired the Historical Texts service on 31st July 2024.

You can access the content at the links below

Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) features page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 32 million fully-searchable pages.

Newspapers

Search for articles in national or regional newspapers, some going back to the 1980s.

Useful for an understanding of how the media and different local areas respond to events
Useful to see how different newspapers report on the same story
Contains text only, no images
Remember that newspapers are not academic sources, and will often be biased

Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Online access to newspaper articles from UK newspapers

For access to additional resources we strongly recommend that you join Gloucestershire public libraries, or your own local public library service. Membership will enable you to access the British Newspaper Archive from within libraries, and give you access to a range of other resources.

Zines

The new Zines@FCH collection has just been launched.

Zines are a place for people to be able to tell their own stories, through the art of DIY magazines.

Find out more, or drop into the library to have a look.