Art Research Tools: Home

FactFacts, Definitions, & Background Information:

Our Facts/Definitions page searches hundreds of reliable dictionaries and encyclopedias.

NewsNews Resources

Peer Reviewed Journals (Expert Opinions and Research):

• Central Index. Interdisciplinary coverage of journals, books, and other materials.
• Academic Search Complete.  Multidisciplinary database of full-text articles from scholarly journals, magazines, government documents and other sources. Good starting place for basic coverage.
• ATLA Religion Database Articles from across many religious studies journals. NOTE: replaced by the Central Index database.
• JSTOR. Articles from scholarly journals in the arts and sciences, including many in the visual and performing arts.
• MLA  Articles, books,and more on modern languages, philosophy, literatures, folklore and linguistics. NOTE: replaced by the Central Index database.
• Project Muse. Articles from scholarly journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
• Scopus. Discover citations with some full-text articles focusing largely on STEM fields including science, medicine, technology, and the social sciences. Includes tracking by citation, and identifying high impact articles.

• Multiple Database Search Tool: Go here if you know the exact title of an article, i.e., "contingent cubism".  This full-text finder tool will provide direction to the source of the article.
• Zotero. Cite your sources using Zotero.

Streaming Films and Video

• Academic Video Online includes more than 48,000 video titles on essential subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, history, music, film, and more.
• Films on Demand: Streaming video database that offers over 20,000 titles, and covers a variety of academic subjects, from producers such as BBC, PBS, Meridian, National Geographic, and more. Links can be shared through email, integrated into Canvas, or viewed in the classroom.

BOOKS

Expert opinions can be found in books: see our local book catalog for searching. You may want to expand your search to the I-Share state-wide catalog (using the drop-down option below the search box) or our electronic book page.

HathiTrust maintains HathiTrust Digital Library. Since 13 October 2008, it preserves and provides access to material scanned by Google, some of the Internet Archive books, and some scanned locally by partner institutions. As of May 2010, it includes about 6 million volumes, over 1 million of which are public domain (at least in the US).

One additional free search tool to consider is Summon (from Princeton). You will see information within books and other materials...but you will not have links to the full text materials.

Finally, you can also perform fulltext searching into thousands of recently published books using the Title Preview option on the ebrary platform.

Here we list some additional web-based resources of interest:

MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

• ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
• MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
• ART HISTORY RESOURCES ON THE WEB
  Professor Chris Witcombe of the Art department at Sweet Briar College has organized art history sites on the Web. His directory is full of useful and regularly updated links and is divided into the following categories: Prehistoric Art, Ancient Near East, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Art in Early Europe, 15th-Century Renaissance Art, 16th-Century Renaissance Art, 17th-Century Baroque Art, Baroque Art, 18th-Century Art, 19th-Century Art, 20th-Century Art, 21st-Century Art and Prints & Photography. He also includes a list of museums and galleries and research resources.
• ARTCYCLOPEDIA
  The Artcyclopedia editors have compiled a comprehensive index of every artist represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources. Artcyclopedia only provides references to sites on the World Wide Web where artists' works can be viewed online and the vast majority of the artists in their database specialize in painting and sculpture. A great resource for researching particular artists.
• ARTSOURCE
  Artworks from the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art.
• BEST OF HISTORY WEBSITES--ART HISTORY
• METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
• MOTHER OF ALL ART AND ART HISTORY LINKS PAGES
• SASKIA ART IMAGES
  The collection contains 30,000 digital images of paintings, sculpture and architecture, including images from many important collections: the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Uffizi, and the Louvre as well as archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Egypt. The images can be displayed and downloaded in high-resolution format. Additionally, the descriptive data about the images includes references to the occurrences of these images in 19 major art history texts, including Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 12th edition; Understanding Art, 7th edition; Art and Ideas, 10th edition; Discovering Art History, 4th edition.
• WEB GALLERY OF ART
• Library of Congress Popular Graphic Arts Collection
  About 15,000 historical prints (ca. 1700-1900) created to document geographic locations or popular subjects and sometimes used for advertising and educational purposes. Most are by American printmakers (e.g., Baillie, Currier & Ives, Sachse & Co.), but publishers in many other countries are also represented (e.g., Antonio Vanegas Arroyo). Subjects vary widely, from city and harbor views, street scenes, and manufacturing plants to genre scenes, historical events, religious iconography and portraits.

• Oregon State University's Mary McDonald Rare Book and Manuscript Collection contains items created from the year 3000 BCE through the twentieth century. Collectively, these materials illustrate the global history of writing and print.

• Medieval English and French Manuscripts, a joint effort of the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, presents digitized open-access medieval manuscripts and is available anywhere you have internet.

• The Comic Book Sound Effect Database is a collection of over 2,000 onomatopoeias from over 200 comic books.

• Discover Islamic Art a virtual museum portal facilitated by the nonprofit organization Museum With No Frontiers that invites visitors to explore the art and material culture of Islamic societies throughout the Mediterranean region.

• Arts and Culture service, Google collaborated with over 1,200 museums, galleries, and institutions from around the world to digitize some of their exhibits and make them available online. Exhibits can be browsed by a number of facets, including time period, artist, and color.

• Life Magazine archives hosted by Arts and Culture.

• Arts and Culture from Google

Google Image Search (keywords) -- search for images using keywords.

Google Image Search (image) -- drag and drop an image to start a search

Artstor now offers over 1 million public domain images.