Clark Family Library: FYS-199-21 Protest, Provocation, Perform (Barber Fall 2024): Search Strategies

Find Contextual Information

Finding contextual information is an important part of the research process. It helps you:

learn about topics with which you are unfamiliar
identify important facts related to your topic - keywords, dates, events, history, and names and organizations
refine your topic
find additional sources of information through bibliographies and works cited

Remember to keep going back to your question:

See Databases A-Z to search for databases. Most databases are paid for by the library, but some are freely available to all.

Specific Databases, Museum websites and Art Encyclopedia's to try, starting with the top three for beginning your study:

Art & Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
Covers fine and commercial art, sculpture, and additional emphasis on architecture. Offers over 63,000 art images, 600 full-text journals dating back to 1990 and more than 220 full-text books.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
This database is great for background information. It provides access to more than 630 full-text reference books and over 3 million full-text entries.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full- text of back issues of peer-reviewed journals as far back as the 1800s in the arts, sciences, ecology, botany, language, literature, and music. Multidisciplinary.

The Met Museum Artwork Database
5,000 years of history through 490,000+ works of art. The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.
Grove Art Online
The foremost scholarly art encyclopedia, updated regularly and covering global art and architecture from prehistory to present day
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Includes peer-reviewed articles contributed by nearly 7,000 scholars from around the world, accompanied by images, bibliographies, and links to additional resources
Bibliography of the History of Art
A free database from the Getty. No password needed. 1973 to the present.
Bibliography of the History of Art
Database of material published between 1975 and 2007. No access to the articles themselves: this is purely a bibliography.
OpenBibArt
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.

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Offers full-text access to over 12,000 journals, including more than 10,000 peer-reviewed titles. A great database to start your research
Project Muse: Basic Undergraduate Collection This link opens in a new window
Collection of heavily indexed and peer-reviewed journals in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Database includes 340 full-text journals from 80 scholarly publishers from 1995 to present. MUSE.