These are my recommendations for your best bets in researching Art topics. For additional links and resources please see the navigation bar on the left side of this research guide.
Artstor was a digital library with 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.
Artstor retired on August 1, 2024—all content, resources, and functionality has moved to JSTOR. For more information, see the Artstor migration guide and Artstor on JSTOR videos. Artstor content is available at Artstor on JSTOR.
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
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 is a digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and diverse primary sources. FSU has access to JSTOR’s Archive, Primary Sources, and Global Plants collections.
Tutorials:
JSTOR on YouTube
How to search (04:20)
Primary Source Collection: 19th-Century British Pamphlets (00:51)
Abbreviation: jstor
Vendor: JSTOR
Coverage: 1665-present
Subjects: Arts Administration, Art History, *General / Multi-Subject
Type: E-Book Collections, E-Journal Collections
Oxford Art Online is the access point for Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and other Oxford art reference resources. Users can access—and simultaneously cross-search—an expanding range of Oxfords acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies.
Abbreviation: grove-art
Vendor: Oxford University Press
Subjects: Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Museum Studies, Studio Art
Type: Biographies, E-Journal Collections, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries, Images, Indexes / Catalogs
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:
The following are just a few subject headings that may be used when searching the catalog:
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:
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:
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