Research Guides: *Art History: Home

Visual & Performing Arts Librarian

Leah Sherman

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0027H Scholars Commons

Subjects: Art, Art Education, Dance, Design, Fine Arts, Theatre

Welcome

Welcome to the FSU Libraries' Art History Research Guide

Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises (sketch), 1910 (Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

Catalogue Tips and Tricks

These are my recommendations for your best bets in researching Art History topics. For additional links and resources please see the navigation bar on the left side of this research guide.

Art & Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
Art & Architecture Source is the largest full-text art research database covering fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as architecture and architectural design. With strong international coverage, it offers hundreds of full-text art journals, magazines and books, plus detailed indexing and abstracts and thousands of images.
Resource URL: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,url,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=asu
Abbreviation: eas
Vendor: EBSCO
Coverage: 1914–present
Subjects: Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, Arts Administration, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Museum Studies, Studio Art, Urban and Regional Planning
Type: E-Journal Collections, Indexes / Catalogs
Art Index Retrospective and Art Full Text This link opens in a new window
Art Index Retrospective: 1929–1984 provides users access to over half a century of art literature covering fine, decorative, and commercial art. Content includes high-quality indexing of nearly 600 publications, many of which are peer-reviewed, and citations of over 25,000 book reviews. Art Full Text is a foundational art research database providing full-text art journals and books. It covers fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as photography, film and architecture.
Resource URL: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=art
Abbreviation: artind
Vendor: EBSCO
Coverage: 1929–1984
Subjects: Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, Arts Administration, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Museum Studies, Studio Art
Type: E-Journal Collections, Indexes / Catalogs
Arts & Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
The Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database indexing more than 1,100 arts and humanities journals, as well as relevant references from over 6,800 science and social sciences periodicals. Provides multidisciplinary indexing of all fields of arts and humanities, including dance, film, radio and television, language, music and literature.
Tutorials:
Web of Science Tutorials

Resource URL: https://webofknowledge.com/?DestApp=WOS&editions=AHCI
Abbreviation: wokah
Vendor: Clarivate Analytics
Coverage: 1975–Current
Subjects: Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, Arts Administration, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Studio Art
Type: Indexes / Catalogs
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
ARTstor is a digital library more than 1.5 million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.
The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. The Digital Library serves users both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged in the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Medieval Studies, Music, Religious Studies, and Renaissance Studies, all of whom find the images in ARTstor to be relevant to their teaching and research.

Tutorials:
Using ARTstor
Training videos on YouTube

Resource URL: http://library.artstor.org/library/welcome.html
Abbreviation: artstor
Vendor: ARTstor
Subjects: Archaeology, Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, Classics, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Museum Studies, Studio Art
Type: Images
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A database of the back issues of core journals in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. The gap between the most recently published issue of any journal and the date of the most recent issue available in JSTOR is from 2 to 5 years.
Tutorials:
How to search (04:20)
Primary Source Collection: 19th-Century British Pamphlets (00:51)

Resource URL: http://www.jstor.org/action/showAdvancedSearch
Abbreviation: jstor
Vendor: JSTOR
Coverage: 1665–present
Subjects: Arts Administration, Art History, *General / Multi-Subject
Type: E-Book Collections, E-Journal Collections

Use the Library of Congress Classification Outline to browse for books in your subject area. Here are some examples in the visual arts to get you started:

AM --- Museums, Collectors, and Collecting
N --- Fine Arts
N (5300-7429) --- Art History
NA --- Architecture
NB --- Sculpture
NC --- Drawing, Design, and Illustration
ND --- Painting
NE --- Print Media
NK --- Decorative Arts
NX --- Arts in General
TR --- Photography
TT --- Handicrafts, Arts, and Crafts

The following are just a few subject headings that may be used when searching the catalog:

Architecture -- History
Art -- American
Art -- Ancient
Art -- Bibliography
Art -- Early Christian
Art -- Historiography
Art -- History
Art -- Italy
Art -- Modern
Art and history
Art and society
Art criticism -- Historiography
Art criticism -- Methodology
Art criticism -- Philosophy
Art -- Historiography
Art --Methodology
Art -- Philosophy
Art -- Psychology
Feminism and art
Folk art
Graphic arts
History of printmaking

http://beets1278.blogspot.com/2012/10/boolean-logic-is-not-logical.html

While researching in Art History you will be working with several different kinds of books along the way, and you might see these differentiating names in any library catalog you are using. Here are a few definitions for some of the major types you might encounter:

Artists' Book
- Perhaps not surprisingly, these are books created by artists. They can be traditionally made or might be composed of multimedia materials. FSU has an incredible selection of Artists' Books - find them in Special Collections!
Catalogue Raisonné
- These publications catalog all known works by a particular artist - such as René Magritte - and typically include reproductions as well as biographical information. They are a great place to start your research!
Exhibition Catalog
- An exhibition catalogue is a companion publication to a museum or gallery exhibition. They usually contain scholarly essays relating to the exhibition's concept as well as images of the pieces included in the show.
Facsimile
- A facsimile is a 1:1 copy of an existing book or manuscript. They attempt to faithfully recreate the original in order to be viewed and/or studied when the original cannot be. In addition to artists' books, FSU's Special Collections also has many facsimiles in their stacks.
Festschrift
- This kind of publication is a compilation of essays or writings to honor a particular person. Here is one example from the FSU catalog for the famous art historian Heinrich Wöfflin.
Index
- An index, when published in book form, is a collection of citations for a given topic. They are also sometimes refered to more specifically as a "bibliographic index" or "citation index."
Monograph
- A monograph is a book focusing on a single subject. It is not unique to Art Historical publications but is extremely common as they often focus on specific artists periods, and/or geographical regions.

These FSU Research Guides may be of interest to your research; a full list of guides can be found here. Each guide will also include contact information for the subject librarian in that area of study: