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.