General E-Resources Overview – Guide
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the General E-Resources Overview class. This class is designed to provide a brief overview of some of the electronic resources available to you through Watson Library.
All of the resources mentioned in this presentation can be accessed in a number of ways:
From the Watson Library Portal, click on “Databases A-Z” or choose the E-RESOURCES link, both get you to the same page. From the E-RESOURCES page you can scroll through the entire list of databases, or click on the first letter of the resource to choose from a smaller group. Or you can fill in the search box on the E-RESOURCES page with the title of the resource – this search will look only for electronic resources on WATSONLINE.
From the main page of the portal, you can use the search box near the top right of the screen.
You can search for databases directly from WATSONLINE by running a keyword or title search and limiting your results to Electronic Resources.
*Please note: some of the links in this guide may only work within the Museum.
INDEXES
A Word About Indexes
Indexes are where we go to find additional literature on our topic. We are looking for amplification on a subject, or a particular slant or more detail on our research. Many indexes cover journals where we will find this information. One of the most important things to know, before you look at an index, is what it covers. Coverage refers to when the articles were written, what historical periods and cultural areas are included and what kinds of art (fine arts, crafts, design, film) are included. On the portal, we have briefly annotated all our databases.
Our first resource is Art Index.
Art Index has been indexing art periodicals since 1929, which is much longer than most indexes related to art. It is a comprehensive index to art history covering all types of art and all cultural areas.
When you click on the link from WATSONLINE, you are taken to the Advanced Search page. As you can see at the top, this site allows searching in Art Index, Art Museum Image Gallery (AMIGa), and Art Retrospective. For each of our three resources, clicking on “Database Descriptions” near the top of the page will give you more information on the areas that each database covers. But in short: Art Retrospective covers journal articles from 1929 through 1984, and Art Index covers journal articles from 1984 forward with select Full Text. If you click on the Journal Directory, you can see which journals have been indexed for what dates.
AMIGa is a digital resource of art images collected from various museums (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art). It can be searched alongside Art Index as well as independently.
Let’s run a search across all three, by making sure that each database is checked at the top of the page.
I am going to search on Thomas Cole and landscape. On each line I can limit my search terms to specific fields like author or journal but for the our purposes we can use default, the All-Smart Search. I can further limit the search terms by time period, type of document, whether I want full-text results only, etc. For now though, I’ll search everything, sorting by relevance. If my topic were more obscure I would expand my search by making sure that the option to search for my terms within the full-text documents is checked.
From our search, we have 157 results. The default setting for the results is to list brief citations, but if you click on the article title, you will be brought to a full citation for that article, including an abstract if there is one. A good example is number 6 in our results. The article is Thomas Cole’s “River in the Catskills” as Antipastoral by Alan Wallach in The Art Bulletin, v. 84 no 2 (June 2002). The fuller description also includes additional subject headings, such as Landscape painting, American/19th Century, or Railroads in Art. Clicking on these subject desriptions will bring up other articles with these themes.
The icons under each result show the availability of the article. Our article in The Art Bulletin has full text you can click on, both in a PDF format and in a text format. In cases such as this, where you are given a choice, I would recommend viewing the PDF format whenever possible since the HTML format will not show you any of the images that were in the article.
The fourth article, about Thomas Cole’s “Oxbow” painting is in American Art. You can click on the Find Full-text icon to see if there is an available link to full-text, which in this case there is. Otherwise this same icon allows you to investigate whether WATSONLINE, our catalog, has a print version of the magazine.
One of the other icons is for Interlibrary Loan. If you have set up an account through Watson Library’s Interlibrary Loan service, you can link to your account directly from the Art Index results page to submit a request for articles that are not otherwise available.
Just above the list of results, you’ll notice a series of tabs. With these tabs, we can perform some limiting of our search results directly from this page. For example: If we only wanted full text articles we can just click on the “Full Text” tab. Clicking on “all results” takes us back to the full results list.
Since we included the image data base AMIGa in our search, if we click on the IMAGE tab, we get 13 results from that database. They have been selected because somewhere in the text associated with the images our key words appear.
You’ll also notice there is a search box on the right side of the page above the results list. Here, we can run a new search, or we can search for a term within our current list of results. Let’s say we only wanted articles related to exhibitions of Cole’s landscapes. We can find this by entering “exhibit” and selecting the button to “search within results”.
One final feature of Art Index that I’ll mention today is the “Suggested Subject” on the left side of the screen, which lists a number of subjects that might be of interest based on your search results. This will generate an entirely new search – for example: “Hudson River School” – but you can always use the back button to return to your original search.
Bibliography of the History of Art and Artbibliographies Modern
When we talk about indexes, a very important one for Western art is the scholarly Bibliography of the History of Art, also known as BHA. BHA covers European art from late Antiquity to the present, American art from the European arrival to the present. (It does not cover, e.g., Egyptian, African or Asian art). It also indexes, in addition to magazine articles, books, conference proceedings, chapters within books, dissertations and more.
I will include Artbibliographies Modern in this overview although it is a somewhat specialized database focusing on modern and contemporary art because it can be accessed easily on the same platform with BHA and because contemporary art reaches back to many predecessors. So I have checked off both Bibliography of the History of Art and Artbibliographies Modern. Let us do the same search for Thomas Cole and Landscape using the Advanced Search.
(Note: if I search BHA by itself I will have access to limits that only occur in this database. For instance, I can limit my search to the following kinds of documents: bibliography, book chapter, map, exhibition catalogue review, book review, festschriftern, catalogues raisonnés and more.)
You’ll note that the results page for this interface gives us a lot of information at a glance. On the left, each result has citation information plus a portion of text from the abstract and similar icons to the ones in Art Index. On the right we see which database provided the particular result as well as other subject groupings for this article. Our most recent article is from Artbibliographies Modern.
If we re-sort by relevance, a number of BHA results come to the top. Number 5, “Selling the sublime and the beautiful” is an article in a book both of which were written by curators at The Museum. There is also a book review, a book and a periodical article in our first results. Notice that the tabs across the top allow you to limit your results by these publication types.
Both of the databases here, as well as Art Index and many other index databases offer other features such as saving, printing and emailing results; saving results to citation software; and allowing customization of your use of the database with “My Account” or “My Research”.
NEWSPAPERS
You may have recently heard that the New York Times website, nytimes.com, is now providing free access to all articles published from 1987 to the present in addition to those published between 1851-1922 (which are in the public domain). However, there are limitations to their archive. Even though you can search for articles published back to 1851, you have to pay to see articles published between 1922 and 1987 (unless you are a home delivery or Times Reader subscriber, in which case you can view 100 articles a month from the paid archive for free). You also are unable to get PDF versions of all of the archived articles; some articles are full text only, which means you may lose any images that were published along with them.
The New York Times Historical Database, on the other hand, provides access to a fully searchable digitized image of every page of The New York Times from its first issue on Sept 18, 1851 through Dec 31, 2004. The end date is a moving wall so that the coverage advances by one year, every year. It provides digitized historical New York Times articles in downloadable pdf files.
Clicking on the New York Times Historical Database from the Watson Library portal takes you to the ProQuest database screen. It is possible to search across both the New York Times Historical Database and the newly purchased APS Online at the same time. Let’s uncheck the APS Online box for now.
Now let’s do a couple of searches in the New York Times Historical Database from the basic search screen.
In November 2007, the renovated Pacific galleries and expanded North American galleries of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met reopened. When did the Michael C. Rockefeller wing originally open? To find out, we’ll search” “Michael C. Rockefeller Wing” open*. (By using the asterisk at the end of “open” our search will return results for variants of the word, such as “opens”, “opening,” etc. See Search Tips for more instructions on how to construct a search query.)
We get 54 results from this search, sorted by “oldest (historical) first.” (It is also possible to sort the results by “most recent first” and relevancy using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the screen.) Let’s scroll through the results and look for a relevant article. As we move down the page, we can see another feature of the New York Times Historical Database that the New York Times public site lacks — we can retrieve advertisements as well.
The seventh article in the list, “Met’s Rockefeller Wing Set to Open; ‘Encyclopedic Coverage” by Grace Glueck provides us with the answer we were looking for — the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened on Feb. 3, 1982. By clicking the on the title link of the article or Article image — PDF we are able to see a pdf version of the article. By clicking Page map, we can see where the article appeared in relation to other articles on the original printed page. (Please note that you cannot search within the text of the pdf document.)
Newspapers can also serve as an important resource for biographical information, especially obituaries, so let’s do another search to the obituary of Francis Henry Taylor, the director of the Met from 1939-1954.
Again, from the basic search screen we will type his name in, but this time let’s not use quotation marks since we are not sure how, or in what order, his name will be cited in the article. We know that he died in 1957, but not exactly when, so in the Date range, from: to: field let’s type 01/01/1957 and 12/31/1957. If we click on More search options link near the bottom of the page, we see that there’s the option of selecting Document type to limit our searches too. Even though obituary is an option, let’s leave Any document type selected, since sometimes (especially when it’s a prominent person), his/her obituary may be a full-length article instead of just being written up as a death notice.
This search produces 11 results, and as we scroll down the page we see that the 10th article in our results list notes his illness. The article we are looking for is on the next page of search results — “Francis Henry Taylor, 54, Dies; Head of Museum of Art, 1939-54.” (If we had limited our search to the obituary Document type, we would have missed this article.)
Again, by clicking on the title link of the article we are able to get a pdf version. A number of other options appear across the top of the screen. We can print the article; email the article to ourselves as a link or as a pdf attachement; “copy link” which will provide us with a stable link to this particular article; or “cite this” which will provide a citation for the article in multiple styles (MLA, etc.). Checking the Mark document box will allow us to save this article and return to searching. At the end of our search session, by clicking on the tab called Marked research we can create a bibliography of our selected citations or email all of our marked articles to ourselves.
TIMES DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1785-1985
Now let’s take a look at another newspaper resource, the London Times Digital Archive (which also includes its predecessor, The Daily Universal Register, 1785-1787). Please note that this resource can only be accessed by one user at a time; if you are having trouble accessing this resource, please wait a while and then try again.
A nice feature, Browse by date, is available on the home page in the sidebar. Clicking on this link brings up a calendar which allows you to browse through pages of the paper using a calendar (Sunday editions are not available.)
Let’s do a search for information about the Elgin Marbles. We’ll do a simple keyword search, typing “Elgin Marbles” in the box and moving the radio button to “in entire article content” (the default search is “in title, citation, abstract”) to see what kind of information is out there.
We get 538 results with this search. Our results are broken down in to categories at the top of the screen (editorial, news, picture gallery, etc.). We also are given the option of launching a Google Image search from the results page.
The article citations are listed in reverse chronological order. “Elgin Marbles” from Apr 13, 1816, includes a report by a parliamentary committee assigning a value to the marbles. By clicking on PDF 1 page portrait, we get a pdf version of the entire page of the paper, which we can then email, save, or print. Our search terms are also hightlighted.
By clicking on the Article link or its thumbnail, we are able see the clipping in the browser. By clicking on the Page link we are able to see the article as it appeared on the original page in our browser. The size of these articles can be adjusted by using the drop-down menu. From this screen, we have the options of printing the article from the browser view by clicking the print icon in the left-hand column of the screen. By clicking on the Email or Retrieval link we are also given the options of viewing the newspaper page as a pdf in different sizes and emailing the text citation for the article.
Clicking on the Links link gives us the option of viewing other articles that start on the same page as our original article and the Articles in same category link will show us other articles from the same edition of the paper with the same category tag (news, editorial, etc.).
As with the New York Times Historical Database, we are able to mark records to return to later (up to 50). By clicking on View marked list in the left-hand column of the screen, we are able to see all of the article citations we saved, and have the option to print or email them.
Browse by date, another feature of the Times Digital Archive, allows you to view the pdf page portrait images of each page from the newspaper issue published on a particular date. (Please note that Sunday dates are not available.)
The NY Times Historical Database and the Times Digital Archive are not the only newspaper resources availalble to us through the Watson Library Portal. To see them all, click on E-Resources and the top of the screen and then on Databases by Category: Newspapers.
MAPS AND GEOGRAPHY
COLUMBIA GAZETTEER OF THE WORLD
The Columbia Gazetteer of the World is a database of geographic names with brief descriptions and country maps of over 165,000 places in the world, including 40,000 geographical locations in the United States. It can be useful, particularly to look-up more obscure locations.
For instance, if we’d like to know more about the Italian village, Vicchio we could look it up in CGW, as a place name search.
Click on Vicchio from the results list. We get a very brief entry, detailing the population of the village, noting it’s the birthplace of Giotto and Fra Angelico, and that is was bombed in WWII. We also have the option of viewing a country map, though the place we searched may not appear on it. You can also search by type of place, such as ancient city or mythical place or by geographic features.
DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION
David Rumsey is a map collector who has made over 15,800 maps from his collection available online. His collection’s strengths are rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, but historic maps of Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens, and manuscript maps. It is a free resource.
There are a variety of ways to search the collection — country, state/province, publication author, keyword, or data fields. Let’s do a keyword search for Central Park. A keyword search will search all fields. You can use operators such as “and” but quotation marks are not recognized.
We get 26 results. Let’s look at G.W. Bromley & Co. 41. Central Park, Blackwells Island map from 1879. Double-click on the image to view it in high-quality detail.
From the detail view, we are able to zoom-in to see the future “site of art museum” — the Metropolitan Museum of Art! We are also able to access the map’s image data (author, date, publisher, date of publication and sometime other historical and geographic facts).
Other features include the ability to view maps side-by-side, download them, print them. You can also save them to a group and look at others’ public groups. About 120 maps are available for overlay on Google maps.
PERRY-CASTANEDA LIBRARY MAP COLLECTION
The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas has made available on its website roughly 11,000 (out of 250,000 in its collection) current and historical maps covering all regions of the world.
Let’s say we’re curious to see where Bamiyan, Afghanistan (the former site of the Buddhas of Bamiyan destroyed by the Taliban in 2001) was in relation to the capital city of Kabul. Since we can’t search this collection, to do so, we’ll go to Middle East, then Afghanistan Maps, then Afghanistan (Political) 2003. There it is with its alternate spelling “Bamian” to the northwest of Kabul. In one’s browser, we’re able to zoom-in one time, but if we download these images on our computers we can manipulate them more. The majority of the maps are in the public domain and available for download. Under Other Map Sites in the sidebar are lists of other places to look for specific map types on the web.
It is also worth noting the other geographical resources available on the Watson Library Portal. You can find them under E-Resources, and then Databases by Category: Maps & Geography.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS AND DICTIONARIES
OXFORD ART ONLINE (formerly Grove Art Online)
Grove Art Online has recently joined with Oxford University Press and is now a part of Oxford Art Online. Besides the substantial Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Art Online includes the Oxford Companion to Western Art, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. This new combination now has a new platform with enhanced search functionality and images.
Oxford Art Online can rightly be called an encyclopedia, and it is an encyclopedia devoted to art. Oxford Art Online is a robust art resource for background information, for historical perspective in art, for artists, movements, techniques, art terms, images and more.
There are a number of different ways to search: At the top right of the page is a Quick Search box; the box in the middle of the page searches the titles of articles in the database and also allows you to restrict your search to a particular resource; you can search the image database only; and there is an enhanced Advanced Search feature.
(Note for experienced Grove Art Online users: There is a handy pdf file of tips to help explain the changes in Oxford Art Online)
Let’s do a quick search on the artist Jacques Louis David. You’ll see that there are a number of results, both subject entries and images. Accompanying each entry is a descriptor in parentheses (Subject Entry, Biography, Image, etc), and the database source for the entry (Grove Art Online, Oxford Companion to Western Art, etc). And now let’s take at look at the first link, which is from Grove Art Online.
Clicking on the Grove link, we’re taken directly to their extensive article on David. The navigation on the left provides you with hyper-linked access points to different parts of the article. The bibliography is a very good way to extend your research, so let’s look at that a bit more closely. The “Find” button next to each bibliography entry is a link that will open in a new window and allow you to quickly search the Watson Library and a number of other online sources for that item.
On the left side near the top are a set of tabs. Images offers thumbnail images with links to larger images from the Oxford Art Online database, as well as links to related images outside of the database. Related Content provides direct links to other articles or images within Oxford Art Online that make mention of, or are related to our search term.
Notice in the first paragraph there are a number of links to related articles in Oxford Art Online. I can investigate neoclassicism.
Of course this is an encyclopedia and a great place to find subject entries. We could search on landscape painting or just do a search on China which will give a very extensive survey of various arts in that country over history with many separate bibliographies and many images.
Oxford Art Online will highlight your search term each time it is found in an article. While there are places where this can be a useful feature, it’s also easy to deactivate when encountered in a lengthy article such as this one. Simply go to the top middle of the screen, and you’ll see and icon to turn the Highlight On/Off. Here’s where you’ll also find print, email and citation options.
The Encyclopedia Britannica Online offers a number of research tools through its portal-like website, including videos, a world atlas, timelines, statistical tools, dictionaries, and of course, traditional encyclopedia entries. You are probably familiar with what Britannica includes. It supplements art history resources by being a place where we can research historical and cultural context, find biography on persons related to art such as patrons and subjects of paintings and in general perform fact checking and general research.
Searching on photography, produces a number of results. We want the third one, “photography, history of“, which is the main encyclopedia entry for this subject.
At first glance, the layout is very much like the entries in Oxford Art Online: The body of the article is in the center. The Table of Contents is on the left side of the page. You can easily see where you are in the article, and jump to different parts of the article with a click of the mouse. Let’s look at the section on the post World War I photographic movement The New Objectivity, which is under Perfecting the Medium, 1900- 1945 in the Table of Contents. Links within the body of the article lead to articles on those subjects in Britannica. For example, if I select this link on Edward Weston, I’m taken to their biography of the photographer.
On each page within the article body is a small gray box with a number of links. These will take you to related journal articles, selected web links outside of Britannica, and a bibliography (under the heading “Additional Readings”). The bibliography is also listed at the bottom of the Table of Contents on the left.
Britannica Online also lets you to create what they call a “workspace”: this is a way to keep track of articles, images, links, or other resources you’ve found, and it allows for limited sharing with others. It is similar to Google Notebook, which I would recommend using instead.
You can also save, email, or print an article, and Britannica online gives both the APA and MLA styles of citation for each article.
Going back to the search results page for photography, you’ll see there are a number of links on either side of the results listing. On the right are links to audio and video clips about the subject. And there is one particular feature on the left that I would like to point out today: Britannica Online provides links to scholarly journal articles via ProQuest and EBSCO. These are full-text articles, many of which are not available in the Watson Library because of their scope, but which may be of use in your research. For example, this article from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs on an exhibit of photographs from the Arab world that can be found in EBSCO.
There’s a lot more on the site that I encourage you to explore on your own. My favorite: Under World Data Analyst is a tool that lets you create your own statistical tables and charts (For example: Tourism receipts from foreign nationals or Tourism expenditures by nationals abroad).
OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (OED) AND WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY UNABRIDGED
The Watson Library has subscriptions to the two leading English-language dictionaries: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (Webster’s). Both dictionaries are extremely useful for looking up the definitions of words or art terms and both contain more than definitions. I should point out that Webster’s is considered the American standard, and is the dictionary used by the museum’s Editorial Department.
Let’s look at the term mosaic.
OED’s search results for mosaic include pronunciation, etymology, and a historical timeline. Webster’s result – which you’ll notice is part of Britannica Online – provides multiple definitions of the term, and includes citation information.
There is also a free online version of Webster’s (http://www.m-w.com), which includes audio with their definitions, but the definitions themselves may not always be as comprehensive as those from our subscription version. And there are a number of advertisements and pop-up windows to contend with.
FULL TEXT
JSTOR
It is hard to do an overview of Electronic Resources without mentioning JSTOR.
JSTOR, which stands for Journal Storage, is a collection of full text and searchable scholarly journals providing access to the entire journal content of each journal, including text and images. All journals start at Volume 1 and continue to within 3 – 5 years of the current subscription.
JSTOR includes the Met Bulletin from 1905-2003,the Met Journal from 1968 – 2003 and Metropolitan Museum Studies from 1928 – 1936. There are stand-alone issues of Notable Acquisitions (1965-1985) and Recent Acquisitions (1985-1988) available as well. The articles in these publications are keyword searchable. Because JSTOR includes the scanned pages of each entire volume, you can view the pages as you would browsing the print copy.
Let’s take a look at JSTOR. The bar at the top gives access to the Browse and Search. You can Browse several ways. The Browse by Discipline shows you all the disciplines in a drop-down list. If you choose Art and Art History you see that there are 100 journals in that category as of now. You can also browse by title (and publisher). When you select a journal in the browse you can search just within that journal.
There are several ways of Searching. The Basic Search lets you select discipline(s). So if you’re searching for a subject in architecture, you can limit by that discipline.
Let’s do an Advanced Search. I will enter Ghiberti AND doors AND Florence – one in each of the search boxes. Notice that I could limit each search term to full-text, title, author, abstract or caption. I could limit my results by type, date, language. You can also limit by discipline(s) or journal(s). My search returned over 480 results. If I limit my search to “Ghiberti near 10 doors” (change one AND to Near 10), I’ve cut my results in half and presumably identified articles in which more of the emphasis will be on Ghiberti’s doors rather than some other aspect of his art.
Now perhaps from these results I want to cull a subset. If I want to see whether there are articles that mention the “Gates of Paradise”, I can, from the results page, check the box “search within these results”, enter the word “paradise” and limit the results.
Let’s look at our results again for “Ghiberti and Doors and Florence”. Tabs for “Images in JSTOR” and “Images in ArtStor” are automatically generated. For the JSTOR images, JSTOR is searching the captions of images and showing the pages with those images. For ArtStor, the information associated with the image in ArtStor is searched for the terms.
Notice that under each article there are four links. Article Information is often overlooked but sometimes has extra information – e.g. Article Information for the “Art Imitates Architecture” in Art Bulletin, shows an article citing this article. It also shows all the references in this article, and in some cases has links to the referenced articles.
Page of first match is an important link and shows you the first page where at least one of your search terms appear.
Recently JSTOR implemented improved PDF’s. They load much faster. They are searchable. They provide thumbnails of the pages and they also show you the table of contents of the issue the article came from.
The fourth tab allows you to email or export your citation.
My JSTOR
In line with a current trend, JSTOR has made the first step in customization. If you establish your own account, called MyJSTOR you can save citations. Saving citations can be useful as you are organizing and evaluating your research; you can easily eliminate citations to articles as better ones are found.
Creating an account in My JSTOR is a one time event. After this start, JSTOR is planning to add other features like folders for citations, saved searches and the creation of email alerts.
After you use JSTOR for a while, you might want to make it the first resource you go to to research your topic. That is understandable. Keep in mind though, that JSTOR does not include everything and the variety of resources adds depth to your research.
Originally posted 11/19/07; Updated 6/24/08; Modified 10/24/08
