Internet Reviews

Dawn Behrend

American Society for Theatre Research. Access: https://www.astr.org.

The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) is a US-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theatre and performance, both historical and contemporary. Through its primary archive project, it is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the American theatre. ASTR also sponsors or coordinates several awards, grants, fellowships, and prizes to support and recognize outstanding scholarship in theatre and performance studies. Their next annual conference, “Taking Stock,” will take place November 12–15, 2026, in Minneapolis.

The ASTR site is divided into several sections, some of which require a membership to access. “About” contains everything from the history of the society to its bylaws, meeting minutes, and news and press. “Membership” contains a career center as well as volunteer opportunities, member news, and announcements. “Conferences” contains information about current and past conferences. “Awards” includes a listing of awards and past recipients. “Resources” include a members-only listserv, a listing of doctoral programs, and several other ways to engage and learn. Theatre Survey is the society’s theatre history journal, which is published triannually in January, May, and September. Finally, there is a “Support” tab with options to contribute to a general fund as well as other more specific dance, research, and international scholar funds, to name a few.

The real strength of this site is its membership base and the ability for members to have conversations and work together on partnerships and best practices via the listserv, field conversations, surveys, and working groups. Field conversations, for example, take place across various institutions and are discussions about issues facing the theatre field today; there is a repository of discussions going back to 2020. The Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) unites the graduate-student community within ASTR to facilitate communication among geographically distant members and share news and information relevant to all graduate students in the theatre community. Ultimately ASTR is an all-encompassing resource for those in academia that contains many helpful resources for job searching, a doctoral program directory, mentoring, and publishing. —Gretchen Rings, Indiana University Northwest, grings@iu.edu

GovInfo. Access: https://govinfo.gov/.

Launched in 2016 to replace the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FdSys), GovInfo offers free access to more than 1 million official publications by all three branches of the US government. The site is intended to be a mobile-friendly, comprehensive content management system for preservation and access to all electronic US government information that offers better searching and browsing capabilities.

The usual suspects are here: the Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), United States Code, Supreme Court decisions, and many others. Items not included in the database include tax forms, memos, internal records, or classified or copyrighted records. Years of coverage in govinfo.gov varies depending on the agency or department. Congressional Bills date back to 1994 (103rd Congress) when the GPO first began making publications available online. The oldest content goes back to 1793. The opening page offers a basic and advanced search, citation searching, and multiple ways to browse, including by date, author, committee, and category (bills, statutes, publications, etc.), and links to recent, trending, and popular information.

The basic search box allows for terms to be combined with Boolean operators or for exact phrase searching using double quotes. By default, the basic search returns only the most recent editions of documents in selected collections, but one can click “View historical results” next to each title to see older editions. Search results can be sorted by date or relevance, and filtering options are presented on the left side of the screen. A search on “wind energy AND turbine” retrieved almost 24,000 results, which can be refined by collection, date, government author (e.g., Agriculture Department, Air Force), organization (e.g., congressional committee), or individual author. Custom filters are available when one limits to a certain collection.

For example, limiting the search on wind turbines to congressional bills allows one to further limit to sponsors and co-sponsors, specific Congresses, or different versions of the bill. Each item in search results offers buttons to see full text as PDF or TXT files; an option to see basic bibliographic information; and the ability to share the item to Facebook or email or to get a permalink. The “Help” section offers short screencasts on how to use the site and PDF handouts. Overall this is a great tool for finding government information. —Mark Shores, Miami University, shoresml@miamioh.edu

Linguistic Society of America. Access: https://www.lsadc.org.

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a well-established scholarly organization and member of the American Council of Learned Societies. As such, its website provides broad resources for anyone interested in language science.

Much of the LSA’s website offers typical scholarly organization materials. Meetings and workshops are described, surveying research trends. One rich resource is an archive of LSA annual meeting schedules and abstracts since 1965. Along with basic information about society operations, committees and special interest groups provide additional materials. These sections are unfortunately deemphasized; for instance, the Linguistics Beyond Academia SIG hosts career-related multimedia not fully represented elsewhere. An events calendar and job listings are available to all, and a separate “Careers” section provides further resources. “Advocacy” offers the organization’s contributions to public discourse.

The website’s most substantive portions for librarians and educators present its journals and “Resource Hub.” However, that there is likely much inaccessible to non-members remains a challenge in assessing any membership organization’s web presence.

LSA sponsors four scholarly journals (including the just-launched Journal of Black Language and Culture). Semantics and Pragmatics and Phonological Data and Analysis are diamond open access and hosted separately, but the LSA website serves as a portal. Their flagship Language has a fuller site presence. Although a green open access publication, many of its articles prior to 2013 are accessible only through subscription, and some recent ones are embargoed. Its open repository is counterintuitively in a different site section. Members have immediate access to all issues since 2001. Other free publications include the peer-reviewed database Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Linguistics, conference proceedings, and the Semantics Archive repository.

The LSA Resource Hub provides “videos, audio recordings, and documents related to linguistics careers, scholarship, and teaching.” The host Webcastcloud affords searching and filtering by topic-based keywords or genre-based “channels,” where presentations and interviews with linguists are presented alongside professional development materials. One improvement would be a clearer way to determine which resources are available without membership. Addition of LSA content on external sites may also strengthen this collection, as would fuller description of channels and individual resources.

The LSA home page features resources and provides multiple access points. Though helpful, this prompts the question of the site’s overall purpose in gathering materials that are (mostly) accessible elsewhere. Although one may turn to databases for LSA journals or YouTube for their videos, this site remains a gateway useful for understanding the discipline and connecting with its community. —John C. Rendeiro, University of Connecticut, john.rendeiro@uconn.edu