Digital Theatre+, a platform featuring recorded productions and educational material on theater-related topics, offers good value, an admirable commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a thoughtful approach to accessibility.
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Digital Theatre+ (DT+) is a platform that provides videos, interviews, study guides, and lesson plans on theater-related topics to support the teaching of English language arts and the performing arts. With thousands of resources, the platform offers plenty of bang for your library’s collections budget bucks. It also reflects an admirable commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and a thoughtful approach to improving accessibility.
DT+ has resources for students from the middle school to the university level. Subscribers view topics specific to the level of their institution—for example, through my university’s subscription, I see a menu of “Higher Education” topics. Key among this list are several diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics, including Disability and Performance, Gender and Performance, Race and Performance, and Theatre for Social Change (Figure 1).
The platform is easy to navigate. In addition to browsing by topic, the user can access content through curated study units (“Technical Theatre” and “Theatre Studies”).
Users can also browse the platform using the following facets: Titles, Genres, Themes, People, and Collections (Figure 2). Some of these categories are further broken into subcategories (for example, under Genre, there are ten subgenres including “Romance” and “Bildungsroman”). Resource types include Guides, Interviews, Lesson Plans, Productions, Workshops, People, Series, and Titles.
A turquoise button at the bottom of the page leads to a table of contents that highlights the content my institution—Clemson University Libraries—has access to: 766 productions (including audio productions, poetry recitals, story recitals, and full-length recorded performances of plays), 1,252 video resources (divided into audio essays, audio interviews, class starts, documentaries, e-learning resources, interviews, lectures, poetry analyses, and workshops), 676 written resource (including workbooks and study guides), and 360 teaching resources (divided into lesson plans and other teaching resources, which can vary widely—from an outline of a play to an activity).
I chose one of the Higher Education topics—Disability and Performance—which filtered to a list of 48 resources including essays, productions, documentaries, and interviews. As I began to explore this content, I was disappointed to discover that videos on the platform are not uniformly captioned and contain no written transcript, making it more difficult to locate information about a given topic.
For example, I opened the video A Streetcar Named Desire: Kelly Gough on Playing Blanche (Figure 3).
To understand why this is classified as a disability performance resource required a bit of interpretation. Gough discusses Blanche’s dependency on alcohol—essentially that Blanche drinks to calm her anxiety. Gough also explores Blanche’s use of weight (and particularly disordered eating) to maintain social stature. Gough relates that in her production, the play’s setting has been updated to 2018, which provides useful context for her discussion of the way the ending of the 1951 film adaptation departed from the original script.
From the Gough interview, I navigated to a suggested video depicting a pivotal scene performed by actors in their late teens and early twenties from the National Youth Theatre of England. Students of a similar age would benefit from seeing this scene performed by peers (Figure 4).
Initially, I expected the platform to focus more on North American or European resources. While there is an imbalance, I was pleasantly surprised to see the search term “Africa” produced 127 results (compared to 339 for North America).
In general, the platform’s content reflects DT+’s commitment to DEI. On their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, they describe steps and strategies they are taking to improve DEI and representation, including considering the diversity of the content they acquire and the performers they cast in content they create, seeking external review of material on difficult subjects, and making improvements to accessibility (FAQ | Digital Theatre, 2023)
DT+ has a clean, sleek interface. Generally, I had a pleasant experience using the platform. But, as noted previously, captioning, a technology I have become dependent on as I’ve gotten older, is not uniformly implemented across the platform.
A 2022 evaluation by the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) showed that the platform had an 80 percent WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) score. The LAA reported “issues with assistive technology compatibility, resulting in some users missing information required to perceive and understand content and to operate functions” (Library Accessibility Alliance, 2022). DT+ did not respond to the LAA report. However, a February 2024 VPAT indicates that significant changes have been made to the platform to bring it into compliance with WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 Level AAA. DT+ reported that “at the time of writing, 91% of videos which include speech now have captions. Digital Theatre+ aims to have 100% of videos available with captions. Digital Theatre+ has a policy that any new video with speech must include captions at time of publishing” (Where Can I Find the VPAT for Digital Theatre+, n.d.).
DT+ provides unlimited on-campus or remote access on any type of device. Permitted use of platform content includes adding material to online learning systems as well as printed and electronic course packs. Other permitted uses are expansive and include text and data mining by authorized users for educational purposes.
Clemson University Libraries, a large Carnegie Research 1 University Library, is a member of the PASCAL, or Partnership of South Carolina’s Academic Libraries, consortium. Through PASCAL, we were able to purchase an opt-in subscription for Digital Theatre+ starting on January 1, 2025 using about 14 percent of our humanities liaison’s funding for the calendar year. I’m not privy to other institutional rates—pricing is covered under a nondisclosure clause in the license agreement—but I believe this is a good bargain for the amount of content provided. Our license caps annual subscription fee increases at four percent.
DT+ provides COUNTER 5 Reports to allow users to assess the cost per use of this resource. I’ve been impressed by usage in the first two months of our subscription, and I believe this resource will have a relatively low cost per use.
DT+ supports and prefers Single Sign On (SSO) authentication. Clemson University Libraries uses OCLC’s EZProxy to access DT+. DT+ also supports OpenAthens.
DT+ has a few prominent competitors. Chief among these are ProQuest/Clarivate’s Academic Video Online (AVON) and Bloomsbury’s Arts and Humanities Videos Film and Media Collection. Bloomsbury’s title list includes only a fraction of the content that DT+ has, roughly 650 videos. AVON has 1,160 videos tagged as “Theatre” in their subject strengths area, but doesn’t make a title list available, so I am unsure of the overlap with DT+.
DT+ is an excellent resource; Clemson University Libraries and our performing arts faculty are excited to subscribe through the PASCAL Consortium. We are pleased by the consortial pricing structure as well as the high amount of usage DT+ has shown in only two months’ time. DT+’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ensures that they are intentionally collecting diverse voices that not only represent our students but also provide viewpoints that our students need to learn and grow into functioning adults. While I was initially concerned about the lack of uniform captioning on videos, it appears that DT+ is strongly committed to ensuring both that videos are retroactively captioned and that they are captioned before being added to the platform going forward.
For any institution with a strong humanities program, Digital Theatre+ would make an excellent complement to ebooks and print and electronic journals focusing on English and the performing arts. Even if your institution has already subscribed to one of the competitors listed above, I think DT+ warrants consideration. I would also recommend this resource for purchase by smaller institutions, if pricing is reasonable given the institution’s current enrollment numbers.
Digital theatre+ accessibility conformance report. (2024). Digital Theatre+. https://4771810.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/4771810/Digital%20Theatre%2B%20Accessibility%20Conformance%20Report%20(VPAT)%20February%202024.pdf
FAQ | Digital Theatre. (2023). Digital Theatre+. https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/faq
How to access | Digital Theatre+. (n.d.). Digital Theatre+. https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/how-to-access
Library Accessibility Alliance. (2022). Digital Theatre+. https://libraryaccessibility.org/evaluation/digital-theatre-plus
Where can I find the VPAT for Digital Theatre+. (n.d.). Digital Theatre+. https://support.digitaltheatreplus.com/vpat
10.1146/katina-04022025-1
