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Art

Some basic research tools....

Databases

Hunter College Libraries & CUNY subscribe to excellent sources of information not available for free on the Web.

All resources are available for home use by Hunter students & faculty using your NetID login.

Click the following links for database lists organized by title, subject, or type.

How databases differ

The databases listed below come in a variety of flavors.

Understanding the different services provided by each will lead to more productive and rewarding research experiences.

An index lists the author, title, name of periodical, volume, pages and date of publication, but does not provide access to the article's content.

An abstract is a brief summary of an article or a book that includes bibliographic information such as author, title, source, subject headings or descriptors, etc.

Full text signifies that the complete article is available in a database for immediate reading.

Best databases for art research

 

  • Academic Search Complete  The most multi-disciplinary and general full-text periodicals database. Contains the full text of approx. 3,500 journals, with indexing going back to the mid 1970's on some titles. Updated daily.
  • Art Index Retrospective  Index to articles in journals, museum bulletins and yearbooks on fine and applied arts, including architecture and archaeology; also indexes art reproductions appearing in periodicals. The majority of the articles are in English.
  • Arts and Humanities Citation Index  Multidisciplinary index to research journals in the arts and humanities. Coverage: 1975 to present.
  • Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)  The world's most comprehensive bibliography of scholarly writing about the history of European and American visual arts from late antiquity to the present, BHA and RILA cover European and American visual arts material published between 1975 and 2007. This database indexes and abstracts art-related books, conference proceedings and dissertations, exhibition and dealers' catalogs, and articles from over 4,300 periodicals.
  • Biographical resources
  • Humanities Source  Comprehensive database of journal articles in the humanities; full text from 1994 forward, indexing with abstracts from 1984 forward.
  • JSTOR  Full text of scholarly journals in arts and science, business and economics, language and literature, humanities, and social sciences. Current journals are not entered into the database for 2 to 5 years. Searchable by topic or by journal name.
  • Kubikat  Collective catalogue of four of the leading German scholarly research institutes in the field of art history.
  • OpenBibArt  reviews the literature on arts from Late Antiquity to the present day, providing access to close to 1.2 million of bibliographic records of periodicals, books, exhibition and auction catalogues, published between 1910 and 2007
  • Oxford Art Online The electronic version of Grove's multi-volume art encyclopedia and other Oxford art reference works, with hyperlinks.
  • Oxford Reference Online Full text of over 100 of the Oxford reference works on a variety of subjects.
  • Project Muse  An online collection of full text journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press and other university presses.

Click here for a list of all art history and studio databases 

or  

click on titles above for a specific database