Dance and the New York Times Index

Extract

New York City is the geographic center for dance in America, and the New York Times is “newspaper of record” for the city. It might be assumed, then, that a researcher looking for historical information about dance in America would find a great deal of it by consulting the New York Times Index. That, at least, is what I thought before beginning to gather documents for a dance bibliography for users of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Yet a few random dips into volumes of the NYT Index yielded confusing and (for my purposes) unuseable citations. I therefore decided to set my bibliography aside for a time and instead conduct a search through the entire NYT Index, tracing its treatment of articles on dance, from the first long-hand edition of 1851 up to the present. This is an examination not of the New York Times' coverage of dance but of the NYT Index's useability as a reference tool for dance researchers.