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Online resources for Asian Art research (class guide)
Description: This class covers various online resources for researching Asian Art history, with a focus on Chinese and Japanese art. Most of the resources are in English, with a few foreign language databases included. Reading comprehension of Chinese or Japanese is helpful, but not required. Romanization conversion tables are available on Asian Art Library’s site. Instructors: Min Xu, Jennie Pu.
Class Level: Intermediate – This class assumes some familiarity with Watson Library, such as Watsonline and the Museum’s website. For an introduction to Basic Level resources, we recommend Finding Information on Objects in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art – Guide.
Art Index
Art Index is a comprehensive resource indexing art periodicals in all areas of art history. There are two files in Art Index: Art Full-Text and Art Retrospective.
When you click on the link from WATSONLINE, you are taken to the Advanced Search page. This site allows searching in Biography Reference Bank and Art Museum Image Gallery alongside with Art Index. 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 Full Text 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, and you may browse the journals by just clicking on the journal name.
Through the browse function near top of the page, we can browse by author, journal name or subjects, etc.
Let’s run a search across three resources, by making sure that databases are checked at the top of the page. I am going to search on Zhang Daqian, the modern master painter of China. I realize that other forms of Romanization were used before Pinyin, so I should also search “Chang Dai-chien” and “Chang Ta-chien”. On each line I can limit my search terms to specific fields like author or journal but for 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, I’ll search everything, sorting by relevance. Since I want to find everything about him, I would check “expand” to search within full text articles, for extra results. We have 125 results.
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. In this case, we have 11 full text results. Clicking on “all results” takes us back to the full results list.
If we want to further narrow the results, let’s say we only wanted articles related to the the painting “riverbank”, we can do a search within the results using the term “riverbank”. Now we have 8 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. Take number 6 in our results as an example, the fuller description also includes additional subject headings, such as Painting,Chinese /Attribution, or Tung, Yuan, ca. 900-962. Clicking on these subject desriptions will bring up other articles with these themes.
The icons under each result show the availability of the article. The last article has full text 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.
You can click on the Find Full-text icon to see if there is an available link to full-text. 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.
One final feature of Art Index that I’ll mention 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.
Art Index has a comprehensive coverage of Western language journals on Asian art and is particularly good for finding recent article citations and abstracts.
Bibliography of Asian studies
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains about 730,000 records on all subjects pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present. The BAS included citations to Western-language journal articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften, etc. They stopped adding monographs to this database since 1992.
BAS is relatively a simple database. You can browse by country-subject and browse by Journal.
Let’s do a search on the Japanese “Kimono”. To search variations and the plural of a word, include an asterisk * at the end of the word. In this case we’ll put an asterisk after “kimono” to search for both “kimono” and “kimonos”. We have 50 results. We could also use the subject heading link to bring up other articles on Japanese textiles. By default, records are sorted by author, last name first. you may change the sort to a chronological or reverse chronological sort by using the pull down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your results screen.
To save records, click on the “add to bookbag” link following the record. Your bookbag will stay with you for about 2 hours. You can do different searches and continue to add to the bookbag. The bookbag can hold up to 500 records. You may view your bookbag at any time by clicking on the “view bookbag” link in the navigation bar at the top of the main window. And you can email the records to yourself or download them to your computer.
Let’s do another search on an art historian “Wu Hung” and keyword “Han” because he is a scholar on Han dynasty art. We have 24 results. We see that many of the records are chapters of the same volume that was edited by Wu Hung.
The above two indexing databases each has its own characteristics. One is comprehensive resource for art, and the other is inclusive of many types of publications on all subjects of Asian studies. Personally I found Art Index more powerful in providing article citations. I did a comparison between the two by selecting a few major Asian art journals, and found Art Index much stronger in numbers of record supply and the coverage of the year. Then why are we talking about BAS here? BAS has its stong points too, it’s not just about art and has a wider Asian subject coverage. It is used a lot by sinologists.
JSTOR
JSTOR, which stands for Journal Storage, is an online archive of journal titles which provides full-text access to journal articles. All journals start at Volume 1 and continue to within 3 – 5 years of the current subscription. (it’s called moving wall) You can access it from any computer within the Museum. If you are staff, you can also access it from home (make sure you have remote access set up with Watson). You can get to JSTOR by searching “jstor” in WATSONLINE or on the library portal, or searching the database A-Z list on the library portal.
You can browse the collection of titles by discipline or by title.
There are several ways of Searching. The Basic Search lets you select discipline(s). So if you’re searching for a subject in Art History, you can limit by that discipline.
I prefer Advanced Search because it has more options. I will enter “c. c. wang” AND “ “metropolitan” - 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 92 results. If I want only articles, I could go to modify search and check “limit to : articles”, now I get 38 results.
To find articles in a particular journal, we can limit by expanding the list of titles. “c. c. wang”and limit to journal “Artibus Asiae”. 19 results.
When you click into the article, you see the search terms are highlighted. You can flip the pages using the arrow key. If you click on “select a page”, you’ll see thumbnails of all pages, now you can choose the page you want.
To print, simply click the PDF link.
Other functions from search results screen are: Tabs for Images in JSTOR and ARTstor. If we click on the JSTOR tab, images from the articles within JSTOR would come up. If we click on the ARTstor tab, we see a list of images from the ARTstor database. ARTstor is an image database to which The Met has contributed more than 5,000 images.
JSTOR is a great resource. However, it doesn’t cover all journals. And there is a moving wall of about 3 to 5 years. To find if a journal is in JSTOR, just search WATSONLINE because every title in JSTOR has a record in WATSONLINE.
Next let’s look at some Chinese language resources.
National Palace Museum’s Periodicals Databases
This database provides full text searching of four journals published by the Taiwan Palace Museum. The four journals are: The National Palace Museum Monthly of Chinese art; National Palace Museum Quarterly; National Palace Museum Research Quarterly and the National Palace Museum Bulletin. Searching in Chinese is required. Let’s take a quick look of the search interface. First we have to select which juornal to search, one journal at a time. There is a nice subject classification table. Let’s take a look of the青銅器 Bronzes, we get 173 results in 故宫文物月刊。There is also a author table. Let’s do a keyword search on 青花瓷, we found 23 articles in the above journal. Click on #3 we see there are 15 pages for this article. You can choose to see the text version or the scan of original article with images. Printing is a little awkward, you have to print page by page.
This database was developed while online techenology was in its early stage, it has some drawbacks and it’s kind of clunky to use. However it is still a useful database because of lack of indexing of the four journals.
CAJ (China Academic Journals)
CAJ claims to be the most comprehensive, full-text, Chinese journals database. It contains more than 7,200 journals in mainland China starting from 1915. The database is divided into several series. Our subscription to CAJ is for Series F which includes literature, history and philosophy. All journals are fully searchable, from 1915 to the current issue.
Since CAJ is a Chinese database, it would be most efficient to search in Chinese. We could also search in English, but would find much fewer articles. Let’s do a keyword search for a famous Chinese artist “qi baishi”, we got 6 results. If we search the same name in Chinese characters 齐白石, we would get a lot more hits, this time we got 1504 articles. And we can limit the search by another search, but make sure to check the box “search in result”. Another keyword search: 中西绘画 found 343 articles, we can limit this by another journal title search美术研究and check the “search in result” box. We have 8 articles.
Journal navigation is good for browsing the database. Here we see in Series F we have 711 journal titles. There are 168 in art, and 133 in “history and geography” which contains many titles of archeology and cultural relics. Clicking in, you can see the list of journals, by cover or by title list. On p.3 we see Wen Wu, the most important journal on Chinese art. Let’s take a look at the 2008 issue #1. Article #3 is about a Tang dynasty tomb. Click into the record, you see the indexed fields, and list of related articles. To print, just click “Download PDF’, open the file and click the “print icon” in the document.
CAJ is a wonderful resource for Asian Art research. It’s like a Chinese version of JSTOR. Like JSTOR, it doesn’t cover all journals. It’s also a subscription database. Also like JSTOR, it’s interdisciplinary and you’d find articles you never thought would exist. The good thing about CAJ is that there is no moving wall, we can access the current issues. We heard very good user feedbacks about this database.
A union catalog of academic, public, and special libraries’ holdings, with over 100 million bibliographic records included. WorldCat.org is a free Web-based version of the WorldCat subscription database. WorldCat can be searched by, and display, East Asian scripts, as well as romanization. An excellent discovery tool and useful for searching holdings in many other East Asian collections in North America. For a step-by-step guide to searching Worldcat, please see Worldcat, Google Scholar and European Library Catalogs.
Online Museum Resources on Asian Art (OMuRAA): http://afemuseums.easia.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/museums/search.cgi
An initiative of the Asia for Educators Program at Columbia University, OMuRAA is a portal to “the best online visual resources on Asian Art produced by museums and eduational institutions currently available on the World Wide Web”. Users can browse by museums, special exhibitons, and featured topics as well as narrow searches to a region, time period or art subject area. Entries are annotated.
Webcat Plus
Union catalog of university libraries in Japan. Like Worldcat, Webcat Plus is an excellent discovery tool for finding related materials on a certain topic. Helpful for finding information on Japanese books, such as exact titles for forthcoming exhibition catalogs.
CiNii
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/en/
A database available from NII that searches academic paper information, articles and citations to articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and university bulletins published in Japan. Searching is free and some articles are available for free, downloadable in full PDF.
Harvard University has put together a helpful PDF guide for English users on using CiNii.
JAIRO
http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/
Searches Japanese institutional repositories of research institutions for journal articles, theses or dissertations, departmental bulletin papers, research papers, etc.
JAANUS
http://www.aisf.or.jp/~jaanus/
A free, online dictionary of Japanese architecture and art history terminology. The dictionary contains approximately 8000 terms related to traditional Japanese architecture and gardens, painting, sculpture and art-historical iconography from approximately the 1st century A.D. to the end of the Edo period (1868). It is searchable in English and romanized Japanese, and has linked cross references; however entries are unsigned.
ArtStor
If you are using Artstor for the first time, Arstor has put together a wiki with downloadable PDF documentation on using ArtStor: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Materials
Full-color PDF on Asian Studies collections within ArtStor. The class guide to the Artstor Research Collections: New and Improved also highlights Asian collections.
Additional resources
Harvard University has listed a number of online and PDF guides to using East Asian resources:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/eresources/guides.html
Last updated May 6, 2009.
