Bard-Art History wiki / Researching Architecture and Design

Tips:

To use any of our indexes and databases (except our catalog and ConnectNY) from off campus, click here. Type in the number under the barcode on the back of your ID as the username. The password is library . You'll get an alphabetical list of our indexes and databases. Click on the title you want.

Spelling counts! A foreign title or artist, particularly from a culture that does not use the Roman alphabet, may have a couple of different alternate spellings. Make use of truncation and wildcards. If you know (or want to guess at) a couple of spellings, connect them with an 'or' Boolean operator.

Sometimes the only place you’ll find information about a contemporary artist is on the Web. If you’re googling for images and find some in the website of a gallery, make sure you check out the rest of the gallery’s website for information about the artist or titles of exhibition catalogs that you might then search for in our databases (catalog, ConnectNY and WorldCat).

Make sure you read the notes and bibliographies of the articles and books that you find. Our databases and indexes are limited temporally and in the number of periodicals they cover. The bibliographies and notes in books, reference sources (Grove’s Art in particular) and journal articles will include sources outside the scope of our resources and, by seeing the same articles and authors mentioned again and again, will point you toward the important work in a field (something our indexes and databases do not indicate).

When you’ve found a subject heading in our catalog, or in ConnectNY that seems well-suited to your research, note it. You can use it in other databases like WorldCat or ProjectMUSE.

See the slide curator for images! She maintains the MDID image database as well as the good old fashioned slide collection.

Don’t forget to talk to your professor and to ask a librarian if you need help finding sources (or even if you just want to make sure you’ve covered all your bases).

Warnings:

Read everything critically, but especially scholarship that comes from unvetted sources, specifically Web sites. Scholarly publications like those found in JSTOR, and ProjectMUSE or in the history indexes listed on our websites publish articles that have been reviewed by experts. Anyone can put anything on a web site.

Wikipedia can be a great resource, but double check the information you get from it, and don’t include it in your bibliography. – it’s not the definitive kind of resource that, say, Grove’s Dictionary of Art is.

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Researching Architecture and Design

Suggested Databases:

ArtBibliographies Modern
Art Abstracts
Art Index Retrospective
Avery Index To Architectural Periodicals
ARTstor
Bibliography of the History of Art
Design and Applied ARts Database (DAAI)
Design Arts Retrospective(DAR)
JSTOR (content until about five years ago)
ProjectMUSE (for cultural criticism)
New York Times (content until three years ago)
LexisNexis Academic (for newspaper reviews in general, and for the NYTimes form the '90s to yesterday)
Grove Art Online

Finding Books: Check our catalog, ConnectNY and WorldCat for books.

In our catalog and in ConnectNY always search the architect’s name as an author (last name first). Search the architect’s/designer’s (again, last name first) or building’s name as a subject heading and as a keyword. A keyword search is important in our catalog and in ConnectNY because keywords search across the entire book description, including the contents and notes information. For a modern or contemporary architect or building, there may not be a whole book devoted to his/her/it, but there might be an essay in a book that is about a larger idea or movement or group exhibit, and so the architect’s or building’s name might appear in the Contents or Notes section, and nowhere else in the description. Note any appropriate subject headings, they can be used for searches in other databases, like WorldCat and ProjectMUSE.

WorldCat is a catalog of thousands of library catalogs, including all the major research libraries and many, many specialty art libraries. Repeat the searches you performed in our catalog and ConnectNY. If you find a book you want to read, come to the Reference Desk and talk to the librarian about an Interlibrary Loan.

Journal Articles: Try the Avery Index , DAAI, DAR and JSTOR for journal articles. Use the Advanced Search, and search on the architect’s name as a subject or a descriptor. If you get too many hits, try adding a keyword that might narrow your subject down. To see if we subscribe to a particular journal open up another window to our homepage and click on our “a to z journal” link. Type in the title of the journal, click on the Search button and then click on the links (if any) listed below. If there’s no link, see the librarian at the Reference Desk about an Interlibrary Loan.

Newspaper Articles: For information before three years ago, use the New York Times. We have the complete run of the New York Times from 1851 to three years ago online (see link above). This is a particularly nice database because the information is laid out in page image, and includes any photos or reproductions. If the photo is blocked because of copyright restrictions, click on the page image and enlarge. For more recent reviews or articles and for major papers other than the Times, check LexisNexis Academic.

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