eReviews: Visual Arts and Short Takes
By Gail Golderman & Bruce ConnollyJan 15, 2011
We can look at this group of resources as a series of gifts given to facilitate the research and enrich the lives of those privileged to use them. EBSCO, with its fierce determination to assemble the most comprehensive and accessible bibliographic and full-text databases, gives us Art & Architecture Complete, featuring the most extensive collection of full-text art journals on the market. The WilsonWeb Art Suite package, with bibliographic coverage extending back eight decades, presents the long view. Both of these producers give us excellent extensive image collections to complete their offerings. Oxford Art Online grants access to the art world’s most authoritative scholarly reference source, The Grove Dictionary of Art, along with several additional high-quality titles—packaged so beautifully that users will be tempted to linger over their work for as long as possible. ARTstor delivers beauty and a sense of what can be accomplished when a broad set of contributors work together to realize an ideal.
Art & Architecture Complete
EBSCO Publishing
ebscohost.com/academic/art-architecture-complete
CONTENT Art & Architecture Complete is a comprehensive research database offering cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 800 academic journals, magazines, monographs, and trade publications. It provides full-text coverage of more than 350 periodicals and 233 books, with selective coverage of more than 70 additional publications. The resource also includes an Art Image Collection of over 64,000 images provided primarily by Picture Desk, Inc. This is not to be confused with EBSCO’s Image Collection, included in most (though not all) of its research databases and containing images from Archive Photos, Canadian Press, Motion Picture & Television Archive, and MapQuest, as well as a variety of public domain images.
Designed to be used by a diverse audience that includes art scholars, artists, designers, and students, the database has wide-ranging subject coverage, encompassing architecture and architectural history, interior and landscape design, fine arts, urban planning and development, art history, and more.
Currently, the title list includes academic journals such as American Art, History of Photography, Journal of Architectural Education, Public Art Dialogue, Tribal Art, and Visual Arts Research; magazines like Design Graphics, Journal of Stained Glass, Museums Journal, Old House Journal, and View Camera ; trade publications à la Access by Design, Architect, Artforum, Building Design, Design Week, and Hand Papermaking ; and chapter content from titles such as Designing Modern Germany, Histories of Art & Design Education, and Rock Art of the Western Canyons . Note also that Art & Architecture Complete contains nearly 500 unique titles not found in Academic Search Premier.
USABILITY Those of us familiar with the EBSCOhost platform welcome new features and functionality that accompany the regular updates, implemented subtly so as not to frustrate our users. A few options are particularly useful from an instructional standpoint. Image Quick View allows users to look at thumbnails in an article from the Result List, Citation View, or Folder View. Users can search for articles featuring image types (color, illustration, map, etc.) from the Advanced Search mode with either the Image Quick View limiter or the Image Quick View Types limiter. High-resolution options are available, and the detailed image records include proper citation information with a “How do I cite this image?” link. More important, records also offer “What am I allowed to do with this image?” permission assistance—a godsend for student use.
Of course, that’s just images—Art & Architecture Complete supports “cited reference” searching as well; the Cited References link at the top of the screen leads to a list of citation records for the search terms entered where users can click through to the relevant articles.
The interface also supports the more overview-oriented Visual Search, an interactive mapping of result sets that allows users to select either Block Style or Column Style display. Block Style also includes a set of control arrows (Results Navigator) and Results Map to help users quickly navigate to a desired section or specific citation or get an overhead view of the retrieved citations. There are three folder areas for use once users sign into “My EBSCOhost”: “My Folder,” a holding area for articles, citations, and personal notes saved during a current session; “My Custom,” which can be shared with other users; and “Shared by,” custom folders created by others and shared with you. These can be nested within other folders and organized to manage items on a particular topic or for a certain class.
Features soon to come include even more folder enhancements for better organization and sharing, an iPhone application for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch users, integrated real-time news on the Results List, and updated citation styles to include Harvard and APA 6th edition.
PRICING For an instituion such as ours of roughly 2400 FTE, the cost of a one-year subscription is around $6000. This is based on a number of factors, including whether the institution is a two-year or a four-year school and consortia agreements. A 30-day trial is available.
END USERS Experience tells us that students use products they are familiar with, and Art & Architecture Complete has both excellent content and a widely popular interface in its favor. Users will value the ease of searching as well as the various output options that make a difference, including Cite, Export, Create a Note, and Bookmark. Factor in the ability to cross-search with additional EBSCO databases that complement their research process, and all will be happy.
WilsonWeb Art Suite
The H.W. Wilson Company
hwwilson.com/databases/artsuite.cfm
CONTENT With its WilsonWeb Art Suite package, H.W. Wilson has assembled a powerful and comprehensive resource that provides access to eight decades of arts- and architecture-related research, complemented by extensive collections of images from the art and film worlds.
Art Full Text (AFT), the cornerstone of the suite, covers all art disciplines and presents material on advertising art, antiques, art history, computers in art, crafts, fashion design, folk art, industrial design, interior design, museum management, pottery, textiles, film, television, and video. In all, over 600 titles are indexed here, 260 of them peer-reviewed.
The database is international in its indexing coverage (updated daily), which includes arts journals and periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, plus 18,000 dissertations. Wilson’s Art Index Retrospective: 1929–1984 complements AFT, extending bibliographic coverage back an additional 55 years. Wilson’s acclaimed indexers have reconciled the subject heading variations between the two components, so searching over the full span of coverage is easy and seamless. The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, a new addition to the Wilson roster, pushes the total number of bibliographic records for the full suite over the million mark, covering 1934 to the present (updated weekly). There is even selective indexing back as far as 1741.
Two image collections—Art Museum Image Gallery and Cinema Image Gallery—round out the package; both are all rights-cleared for use in educational settings. Art Museum Image Gallery—with over 165,000 meticulously described images from an international array of museums and private collections—has extensive coverage of contemporary artists as well as material dating back to 3000 B.C.E. The scope is global, and Wilson claims that the gallery has demonstrably more content than its competitors.
USABILITY Each of the databases in your Art Suite subscription will be added to the Database Selection Area along with your other WilsonWeb products. Although the components of the Art Suite are cross-searchable, users may not wish to include all of them in every search.
For one of our more adventurous art history majors who was beginning to explore the possibilities of a senior thesis on representations of monsters in art, we began with the default All—SmartSearch option on the word monster*, with all five titles marked for searching. The results list of over 2700 hits (including more than 1500 images) persuaded us to take advantage of Wilson’s controlled vocabulary to develop a more viable list of sources.
Clicking the Browse tab to look for “monsters” in Subject(s), we selected “Monsters in art” and “Monsters in art/Exhibitions” as the most likely search options. With the two subjects checked, however, it’s not obvious what searchers are supposed to do next. The Selected Entries button looked more promising than the Clear Entries button did, and clicking on that produced 57 results.
Users may then narrow the set by Database(s), Author, Subject, Date of Creation, or Document Type. But when we tried to narrow to the Art Museum Image Gallery and, subsequently, the Cinema Image Gallery, we got no results. From our perspective, only viable narrowing options ought to appear in this list, so the presence of nonworking options was disconcerting.
Of the 40 citations in this search that came from AFT, only eight were available in full text—two of them in Spanish and French. Ordinarily, most students avoid using non-English-language scholarship in their research, which means that a significant portion of the literature of art history will be lost to them. WilsonWeb attempts to address this problem by providing a converter that translates HTML full-text articles written in German, French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese into English, although the results were comically impenetrable much of the time.
Clicking the Peer Reviewed tab dropped our original set of 57 items down to 21. Clicking the Non-Peer Reviewed tab, however, gave us the same set again. A closer examination of the screen revealed that the previous tab had not disengaged when we selected the new one, as is conventional with most electronic resources. Even clicking on the All Results tab never returned us to the full list of citations. In systems where the limiters are check boxes, it’s obvious when they are being applied to narrow a search, but it’s baffling and frustrating when the limiters are tabs.
WilsonWeb displays subjects culled from the search results in the left-hand frame and invites users to run a new search. “Demons in art” coincided nicely with our student’s interests and produced a valuable list of additional references. Several items in the results list display an icon that indicates there is a link to the artist’s entry in Biography Reference Bank, a definite enhancement to the research process. Finally, Wilson provides a link to the Bibliography of the History of Art (see E-Short Takes, p. 138) as another option for the thorough researcher to explore.
PRICING WilsonWeb Art Suite pricing centers on AFT, which starts at $5460 for a single simultaneous user for two- and four-year colleges as well as for public libraries. Wilson offers special rates for K–12 subscribers. New subscribers to AFT will receive substantial discounts, and there are significant discounts as other components are added to your Art Suite package. Free trials are available.
END USERS Despite our frustrations, we were able to get valuable work done with the contents of Art Suite. Even if researchers do not opt to incorporate the image gallery databases into their search strategies, the galleries themselves are gorgeous and inviting, with tremendous value as stand-alone resources.
The relatively low percentage of fulltext titles means that this resource must be backed up with a strong arts journal collection. That suggests a target audience of research libraries at institutions with commitments to arts and humanities programs. But the research material that is here, plus the presence of the library holdings feature, links to external databases, and an integrated document delivery, works to make the Art Full Text and Art Index Retrospective combination an especially viable resource that serious arts researchers will thank you for having.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford University Press
www.oxfordartonline.com
CONTENT Oxford Art Online (OAO) builds impressively on the foundation of Grove Art Online and its 34-volume print predecessor, The Grove Dictionary of Art. Grove Art Online (GAO) was reconceived in 2008 as Oxford Art Online, a portal that combines access to well over 40,000 signed subject entries and biographies—enhanced by 5500 images, 40,000 links to external images, and a half-million bibliographic references—from GAO itself with another 5000 entries and 500 images from the other titles in the Oxford suite.
The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke, provides critical treatment of over 1700 artists and contributes extensive coverage of contemporary art movements, theory, and criticism to the OAO mix. The Concise Dictionary of Art Terms, edited by Michael and Deborah Clarke, gives researchers ready access to 1800 entries on art terms, critical periods, and styles in the visual arts, while the 600 articles in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, thoroughly survey Western and non-Western traditions and perspectives on the meaning and value of all the arts. All four titles are cross-searchable via the OAO portal.
In addition to the lavishly illustrated texts themselves, OAO also includes links to Oxford’s “image partners” including ARTstor (see below), Bridgeman Art Library, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Images for College Teaching, and Art Resource.
We tend to think of reference titles as fairly static, but that’s hardly the case with OAO. The November 2010 update, which “examines the propensity of artists working in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to incorporate aspects of science in their work,” included three original essays on this theme and a dozen new biographies. New articles from the forthcoming
Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art, edited by Colum P. Hourihane, were published in November, as was another upload of articles from the forthcoming Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, edited by Joan Marter. Finally, addressing one of the key weaknesses of any print reference source, the editorial team updated bibliographies for more than 550 articles on the Italian Renaissance—the latest OAO rotating Spotlight subject area. Content is updated three times a year. In terms of visual arts reference, there’s nothing that approaches GAO’s scale or scholarly authority.
USABILITY The Oxford Art Online homepage combines the features of an elegantly designed newsletter (with information about update themes, new articles, upcoming online demonstrations, spotlighted subject areas, and FAQs) with the capabilities of a versatile but easy-to-use search engine. While Oxford fills the space with information, striking images, and searching power, the interface “reads” very cleanly and is as visually appealing as any we’ve used.
The visible quick search box in the upper right-hand corner gets extra points for including a check box that limits the query to GAO only. The main search area on the homepage allows users to look for terms in any or all of the four OAO titles or to execute an image search. The results list allows for a second opportunity to limit results to a specific title, and in the case of GAO, there is also a cascading set of categories—Art and Art Forms, Geography, People, Styles and Cultures, Time Periods—each with its own subcategories, that permit the construction of very precise search strategies. At the results stage, searchers can also modify the search to display results that include biographies, subject entries, or images in any combination.
Advanced Search mode gives users four tabs—Main Search, Image Search, Biography Search, and Bibliography Search—each with its custom set of search fields. Advanced Search also retains all the title and category limiting capabilities of the more basic search option.
The standard capabilities—phrases searching with quotation marks, truncation and wildcards, and Boolean and proximity operators—are all available to searchers. We particularly liked being able to connect to our own catalog via the Find button associated with each entry in an article’s bibliography. American subscribers, however, will need to be attentive when using the tool because the editions in the bibliography tended to be the British ones, and there was often some variation in title from the U.S. version.
Tucked away in the Tools & Resources area is access to a dictionary of abbreviations used throughout OAO; a time line; an extensive set of brilliantly conceived lesson plans on modern art, photography, Louis I. Kahn, and Picasso; and a group of thematic guides on such subjects as African American art, cubism, women in the visual arts, and fashion. The lesson plans in particular are an incredible find that could go completely unnoticed by casual users of the resource.
Output options include print, email, viewing the article’s citation in MLA or Chicago format, and exporting the citation in RIS format for ReferenceManager, ProCite, EndNote, or RefWorks. MARC 21 records are available as well.
PRICING The annual subscription for OAO ranges from $1750 for a single user to $2590 for unlimited access. Discounts are available through consortia, and libraries may request a free 30-day trial.
END USERS The worst thing that can be said about OAO is that it is so captivating and attractive that it requires a certain amount of discipline on the part of researchers just to stay on task. It will meet the needs of scholars and teachers at the college and university level and give their students a thorough grounding in the artists and research topics they’re investigating. This is as classy as it gets.
ARTstor Digital Library
ARTstor
artstor.org
CONTENT Originally established by the Mellon Foundation in 2001, ARTstor Digital Library (ADL) is an independent nonprofit digital library totaling more than one million images with accompanying metadata in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Licensed to nonprofits worldwide, this growing repository currently offers access to nearly 200 collections, which include global contributions from museums, individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives.
Contribution agreements and new collection releases are regularly disseminated to subscribers, sometimes several in one week. New collections recently publicized include the Circus Collection, documenting the history of the circus in America with 4900 images from the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; nearly 400 images of works by artist, author, feminist, and educator Judy Chicago, including the infamous Dinner Party series; and new photographs of ancient through medieval archaeological and architectural sites throughout Europe and the Middle East, by Israeli-based Sites and Photos. The latest collection agreement includes collaboration with Columbia University to create 2000 still photographs and 200 QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas of traditional and contemporary architecture in Japan.The Digital Library contains a rich suite of tools for viewing, managing, and presenting images for teaching and research purposes. It currently offers three ways to contribute and share local content through Personal, Institutional, and Contributed Collections. Personal Collections allows instructor-level users to post their personal digital images alongside images from ARTstor; the Institutional or ARTstor Hosting Program allows institutions to post their digital image collections onto ARTstor’s servers; and Contributed Collections supports the collaboration process with ARTstor for contributing already-digitized unique collections to the Digital Library for access by other participating institutions.
ARTstor is developing a new subscription-based image management system called Shared Shelf, which will replace the Hosting Program in 2011 and enable seamless integration of image collections with the Digital Library content and interface.
The site also provides practical how-to guides for 23 subjects, including American studies, design, fashion and costume, music history, and photography. Each guide, available in PDF format, offers links to related collections, search tips, and specified search terms.
USABILITY Not just a repository for visual arts scholars, ARTstor offers a wide range of rich content to complement and encourage interdisciplinary studies, integrating high-quality art works with material surrounding key events, historical figures, and cultural objects for use with classics, history, political science, civil rights, film studies, and science and technology research.
Distinctive features and special tools are extensive, while the basics allow users to manipulate images with an online viewer for side-by-side comparisons, zoom and pan for greater detail, and easily export images for use with presentation software such as Keynote or PowerPoint. One of the of the more important tools is the Offline Image Viewer (OIV), developed specifically to allow instructors (and all users) to download much larger images (up to 3200 pixels) from ARTstor for greater resolution. A thorough OIV Help section offers detailed assistance for organizing, managing, and creating presentation slides, as well as importing images from the OIV back into a Personal Collection.
Users can Browse by Collection, Classification, or Geography, and Search by keyword or advanced search terms. Content is organized within ARTstor Collections and/or any Institutional or Personal Collections that might be available.
Registered users can benefit from advanced functionality such as organizing selected images into image groups, attaching personal notes for individual images, and remotely accessing the Digital Library for up to 120 days.
Faculty can obtain instructor-level privileges for uploading image and audio files and creating groups of images for later retrieval and presentation. The image group utility allows users to share, review, edit, or print selected images; image groups are accessible from anywhere you can log in to the ARTstor Digital Library. Image groups can also be downloaded as an HTML file, allowing for posting to a course website.
Not a cataloging expert? A simple form allows users to add additional metadata for uploaded images for Creator, Title, Date, Location, Material, and Subject fields. Each download includes an image file and the descriptive data file. In addition, assigning instructor-level privileges allows faculty to create password-protected folders that can only be accessed by students or other faculty members. Users with these privileges can also create and organize images into public folders, which are visible to all users at an institution and can add instructor notes as well.
PRICING Institutions pay two fees: the Archive Capital Fee (ACF) and an Annual Access Fee (AAF). Pricing is established based on the Carnegie Classification with the range from Community College level ($1150 ACF fee) to Very Large I ($46,000 ACF fee).
END USERS ADL has become the de facto standard for institutional image repositories and pedagogical use, and rightfully so. Scholars, faculty, students, curators, and the like have come to rely not only on the wide-ranging diversity of collections but also on the extensive tool set that offers all types of institutions an affordable mechanism for managing and presenting images for a variety of purposes that go well beyond viewing slides in a general art history lecture.
E-SHORT TAKES
AMICA Library
Cartography Associates
davidrumsey.com/amica
The Art Museum Images from Cartography Associates (AMICA) Library is a growing online subscription-based collection of more than 120,000 high-quality images from 20-plus distinguished museums, including the Asia Society Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Types of works include paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and multimedia installations, as well as textiles, costumes, jewelry, decorative art, books, and manuscripts. Cultures and time periods represented range from contemporary, Native American, and Inuit art to ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian works, along with Japanese and Chinese works. Individual and institutional subscription options are available to access the high-resolution version of the AMICA Library, while all images are available to preview free at a lower resolution. Thirty-day trials available for institutional access.
Artbibliographies Modern
ProQuest/CSA
csa.com/factsheets/artbm-set-c.php
ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM) provides full abstracts of English and foreign-language journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogs, dissertations, and exhibition reviews on all forms of modern and contemporary art and artists, with more than 13,000 new entries added each year. Currently with nearly 400,000 records, the coverage includes performance art and installation works, cartoons and caricatures, conservation and restoration, ethnic and tribal art, video art, computer and electronic art, body art, graffiti, ceramic and glass art, graphic and museum design, fashion, and calligraphy, as well as traditional media including illustration, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and drawing. A sampling of sources includes The Art Book, British Art Journal, Giornale dell’Arte, and Modernism/Modernity . Updated monthly, the full coverage of ABM begins in 1974, but record entries extend back to the late 1960s.
Bibliography of the History of Art
Getty Research Institute
getty.edu/research/tools/bha/
Available free online at the Getty, Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) includes abstracts and comprehensive indexing of more than 2500 publications on the history of Western fine arts and history of art and architecture. BHA is the successor to Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA). Cross-searchable with basic and advanced mode options, the databases cover material published between 1975 and 2007. Both include the literature of European art from late antiquity to the present and American art from the European discoveries to contemporary times. Sources include art-related books, conference proceedings and dissertations, exhibition and dealer’s catalogs, and more. Records are made up of bibliographic citations, abstracts, and indexing, with abstracts in English or French. For material published after 2007, see the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), below.
Design and Applied Arts Index
ProQuest/CSA
csa.com/factsheets/daai-set-c.php
Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI) contains abstracts and bibliographic records for articles, news items, and reviews published in more than 500 design and craft journals and newspapers published from 1973 to the present. Used by students, researchers, and artists worldwide, DAAI covers both new designers and the development of design and the applied arts since the mid-19th century, including coverage of advertising, ceramics, glass, jewelry, wood, graphic design, fashion and clothing, textiles, furniture, interior design, architecture, computer-aided design, web design, computer-generated graphics, animation, garden design, and landscape architecture. DAAI contains over 225,000 annotated references and data on over 50,000 designers, craftspeople, studios, workshops, firms, etc. Nearly 1200 records are added with each monthly update.
Index to 19th-Century American Art Periodicals
OCLC
bit.ly/Index19thCAmArtPer
Index to 19th-Century American Art Periodicals indexes 42 periodicals published in the United States during the 19th century, representing nearly complete coverage of art journals from this period and including nearly 27,000 records. With articles, art notes, stories, poems, and advertisements, along with information on artists and illustrators, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, architecture and design, exhibitions and sales, decoration, and collecting, the subject coverage includes architecture, artists, design, exhibitions, illustrators, painting, photography, and sculpture. The index will continue to be available on the FirstSearch service.
International Bibliography of Art
ProQuest/CSA
proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/iba.shtml
As the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), the International Bibliography of Art (IBA) covers scholarly literature on Western art and includes the most recent index records that were created by the Getty Research Institute as part of BHA. Established in 2008–09, the database encompasses literature up to 2009, including retrospective records for content published in previous years, with at least 60 percent of records from non-English-language publications (principally German, French, Italian, and Spanish). Sources include 500 or more core journals, with detailed coverage of monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings, and exhibition catalogs. Available via ProQuest, 25,000 new records will be added annually going forward, using Getty Research Institute’s own thesaurus and authority files. IBA provides coverage of European art from late antiquity to the present, American art from the Colonial era to the present, and global art since 1945; with subject coverage of fine arts in all media, folk art, architectural history, antiques, and museum studies.
