UMass Amherst Libraries Mark Open Access Week with Publication of Joseph Donohue’s “An American Playgoer in London”

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Over more than four decades, Joseph Donohue made London almost a second home, researching British drama and theatre during the day, attending performances of plays and operas at night, and recording his experiences in a series of meticulously kept diaries. The professor emeritus of English has now drawn together reviews of over 125 theatrical events that capture in vivid detail the immediacy of theatergoing and the vitality of live performance in the openly licensed monograph An American Playgoer in London.

Featuring descriptions of productions of West End and Fringe theatres and the audiences that witnessed them, this collection should appeal to all who find interest in accounts of live theatre and the history of dramatic and theatrical art. Published by the UMass Amherst Libraries to mark Open Access Week, the monograph has a Creative Commons license, making it a free and openly available resource for anyone to use, share and remix.

Open Access Week, Oct. 19-25, provides “an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research—to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives.” It was established in 2008 by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and its student community partners.

An American Playgoer in London, as well as other openly licensed books, is available online or for download via Open Books Library, a catalog of open access books published by the UMass Amherst Libraries. The catalog is hosted on Pressbooks, an open source WordPress plugin that allows for easy reading on the web as well as PDF and eBook downloads for offline reading.