Thomas J. Watson Library

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July 2008
Renee Watson and Angela Washington

In this class we will highlight recent additions and changes to the online environment at the Met that can make your life as a researcher easier. 

Topics covered:

• Portal / Library Website
• Electronic Journals
• JSTOR (new release)
• My Account
• caa.reviews (new database)
• Oxford Art Online (new platform)

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Portal/Library Home. The Home Page of the Watson Library, also referred to as the portal, was developed to put all the relevant information and links for our library in one place. One of our mantras is “one stop shopping”. Let’s take a quick look.

• You can always get to the Portal by typing http://library.metmuseum.org into your browser’s address box
• You’ll notice that there are two search boxes: the one at the top right is for searching the portal site itself. You could enter the word offsite or stacks to find policies relating to these topics or AskArt or JSTOR to retrieve one of those databases. In each case, a full-text search of the Library Website is done, and all entries with the search terms are returned. The other search box is for WATSONLINE. This takes you into the WATSONLINE catalog directly.
• If WATSONLINE is your main destination you can also get there by the link in the top left corner. For the reverse, if you’re in WATSONLINE and want to get back to the Library Home Page, you can click the Library Home link at the top right of every page in WATSONLINE or the Thomas J Watson Library link in the banner.
• In WATSONLINE, a pertinent change, is that you can restrict your search by periodicals or electronic resources. For instance, try a keyword search on BHA limited to electronic resources.

 

• E-Resources, is the part of the Library website that reflects the Hazen Center’s electronic resources. You are probably familiar with the A-Z list of databases which lists both subscription and selected free resources alphabetically. This is always reliable and sometimes the fastest way of finding a resource. 
  If you’re not sure what databases you should look at, then Databases by Category can point out resources that are, for instance, associated with biography, or auction information, or newspapers. All databases on the E-Resources page link to their WATSONLINE record and are briefly annotated as to content.
• I want to call your attention to Other Library Catalogs where links to libraries, geographically arranged, are available. This is a quick way to find the Frick’s catalog, Fresco (in Other Library Catalogs – New York ). Notice that the left side of the grid has links to the library’s home page, while the link on the right side is to the catalog directly. Other Library Catalogs – Europe brings up a number of consortiums and individual European libraries.

 

• To repeat, there are many ways to get to a database: (1) type it into WATSONLINE (2) search the portal – for instance Times London (3) use the Databases A-Z list (find New York Times Historical Newspapers) (4) within the museum – use the URL.
• The left hand column has a number of useful links (most repeated there for convenience). The top two, WATSONLINE and Databases A – Z we’ve mentioned. We’ll deal with E-Journals, a whole world of content, in a few minutes. The next link is to WorldCat. This is certainly a useful research tool to locate books that WATSONLINE doesn’t have or that are unavailable for some reason. 
• I’ll remind you that the Instruction Link contains this guide as those from other classes. You can also look to the right where we post announcements.

 

• Watson Library’s Home Page can be accessed from anywhere as can WATSONLINE. So the site reaches more than staff.  Which leads us to those resources where access is limited by license agreement to MMA staff, such as subscription databases and Electronic Journals.  These can be accessed inhouse by everyone and by staff outside the Museum using Remote Access.  Remote Access is a new feature for E-Journals but has been around for many of our databases. If you’ve never done it, here’s what’s involved. If you’re home (or anywhere outside the Met IP range) and try to get into JSTOR or into the periodical Burlington Magazine, you will get a screen that looks like this. Just follow the instructions which ask for last name and Museum ID. Once you have logged in, the proxy server remembers you, so you don’t have to re-enter the information if you switch to a different resource. (You can also see Remote Access Instructions.)

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E-Journals

• About the biggest thing that’s happening with research and computers is the growing number of full-text online resources. Watson Library now has 4400 periodicals available full-text online and you can see them in the E-Journals A-Z list. And 99% of them are available remotely.  If you want to know whether we have a journal online, this is the place to look. You see the provider and available dates. Notice the date range for African Arts.

 

• Another recent development is that more than 600 periodicals in the E-Journals A-Z list provide RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a free subscription that will automatically deliver to you the contents of newly published issues, often with links to full text articles. For instance, you can get a feed of the current issue of Winterthur or American Art. To find out more about RSS feeds and how to set up a feed reader, see About RSS Feeds.
• Another feature provided for E-journals is the link in the upper right hand corner to view recently added electronic journals

 

• If you have a citation, check to see if the journal is on line for the right dates, and then “drill down” to it. For this article:

“Women in Colour: Perceptions of Professionalism in Natural Dyeing during the Arts and Crafts Period”, by Karen Diadick Casselman, in Textile History, Volume 39, Number 1, May 2008 , pp. 16-44

there are two sources, Ingenta and EbscoHost that have the article. Choosing EbscoHost, I eventually get to this PDF of my article. By the way, if you had a citation to an article covered by JSTOR or by Art Index, you could also take the route of going into those databases and searching for your article. Whichever seems quicker to you.

• “Clicking through” or accessing the full-text of an article from an Index database is sometimes possible.  Perhaps the way you discover a citation is through an index database. For example, let me search for calder and jewelry in ARTbibliographies Modern and BHA. Neither of these databases contain full text but we often have full-text available for the periodicals in the result. Our librarians have been adding technology that allows you to find the full text directly. For instance in this search, if I click on the (Testing) Find Full-text link for the first result, “Savage and deliberate” I find that Art Index has the full text and I can get right to it. The second result is in a periodical IFAR journal that we have in print, the third is a book that we don’t have but you could possibly ask for through Interlibrary loan. This is one-stop-shopping.
• Keep watching for more and better access to full-text.

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What’s New with JSTOR

JSTOR, which stands for Journal Storage, is a collection of full text and searchable scholarly journals. A description of JSTOR and how to use it while researching objects in the Metropolitan’s collection can be found in the guide Finding Information on Objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JSTOR has recently released a new version, and this class will highlight those changes. Let’s group the changes in 4 categories: New Look, New search features, Dealing with Results, and MyJSTOR.

New Look.  Let’s take a look at JSTOR

• The colors and presentation are new
• The opening page has a Google-like all purpose JSTOR search box; it also has a link to Advanced Search. So the most used searches are handiest.
• The bar at the top gives access to the Search (about which, more in a minute), Browse and MyJSTOR pages.
• The Browse is easier to use. 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 over 70 journals in that category. You can also browse by title (and publisher). Something new is that when you select a journal in the browse you can search just within that journal.

New in Searching

• Basic Search now lets you select discipline(s). So if you’re searching for a subject in architecture, the limit is handy.
• Advanced Search. The chief new features in the advanced search are: (1) you can search for words near each other, a “proximity search“, (2) you can search within your results and (3) all your searches are saved.  The “Select a Recent Search” drop down appears at the bottom of each search screen.
• 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. This is all standard JSTOR. You can also limit by discipline(s) or journal(s). One new thing is that you can now type in the title of a specific journal instead of selecting it. 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 deal with conservation I can, from the results page, check the box “search within these results”, enter the word conservation and limit the results. I now have about 17 results.
• To re-run my original search, I only have to choose any of the search screens and scroll to the bottom and “Select a search from this session”.

New in 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. Most of these are not new but some are improved. 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 still a link under the individual result. 
• I think one of the best things about the new platform is the improvement in 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.
• There have been a few problems with the new release and all but one has been remedied. When you search with an accession number, page of first match doesn’t work. The PDF search, though, does provide a work-around. Try searching 54.1.2 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.

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. (You also get to accept JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions once instead of for every download and print).  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 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.

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 My Account

“My JSTOR” is an example of one of the latest free features being added to many online databases: My Account. This is a way of tailoring a database to help you manage your research. With it, you can save searches or citations, and be notified when new search results are added.

Let’s examine “My Research”, which is a service provided for the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts – or CSA – databases. The Watson Library subscribes to four CSA databases: ArtBibliographies Modern, Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and Index Islamicus.  With “My Research”, you can save a search across all four or any combination of these databases. You can also set your preferred databases that will open the next time you log in, make adjustments to the display and language options (if you’d prefer to conduct your research in French, for example), or create a link that will give you one less username and password to remember.

If you are unfamiliar with using the CSA databases, I recommend first reading through the online guide Journals, Exhibition Catalogs, Reviews, Festschriften, Newspapers and More, which can be found under “Instruction” on the portal.

When you select one of the databases from the Watson Library portal, or from WATSONLINE, you are brought to the main CSA page. You could begin conducting a search from here and create an account at a later point, which I’ll explain how to do in a moment. However, let’s go to the account page first by clicking on the Please log in to My Research link at the top right of the page.

• The login page is the same for new users and those who already have an account. New users, follow the instructions to create a username and password. Returning users, simply key in your username and password at this point.
• Once you’ve logged in to your account, you’re immediately given the option to create an alert, a way of receiving updates on your searches.
• To create an alert, set your search parameters, enter your search terms and click the “Alert Me” button.
• The next step is where you can configure your account to save your search results or send you updates by email or RSS feed.
• After deciding how you want to receive your search results, you are brought to a summary page for your account. Clicking on the “View Results” link in any of the searches will open a new page listing your results.

If you are creating an RSS alert for your search, you will also need a reader to receive the updates. There is more information on this in the RSS section of our Web 2.0 blog, which you can access from the Instruction page of the library portal.

Back in My Research: On the left-hand side of the summary page, under “Interface Options”, you can make adjustments to the display: change the language, sorting options, the date range, etc. Under “Login Links” you’ll find a direct link into your account that you can then bookmark, which will open with your preferred settings.

Saving searches after you’ve already begun using the database is also easy, even if you haven’t yet created an account. “Please login to My Research” appears on the top right of every page so you have the option to log in at any point in your searching. Also, above the list of results, you’ll notice the text “Alert me”. This is actually a link, and clicking on it will bring you to the login page. From here you may log in to your account or create a new one. Then follow the steps mentioned above to save or create an alert for your search.

Other Watson databases with a My Account feature include Anthropology Plus, Art Index, and as mentioned JSTOR. And the Watson Library has its own My Library Account, which you can read about on the Instruction page of the portal.

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caa.reviews

One of the library’s new resources, caa.reviews offers full-text scholarly reviews that have been written for the College Art Association. This includes reviews of books, exhibitions and other projects in all fields of art history and visual studies.

Within the museum, you may access this resource by going through the library portal and searching for caa.reviews. Or you may directly access it simply by typing http://caareviews.org in your web browser. However, if you are outside of the museum, your only option is to enter remotely through the library’s portal using your Watson Library Account.

The home page has a very clear layout:

• In the main body of the page are the reviews, with the most recent listed first.
• On the left side of the page are links to reviews by category.
• Below that, also on the left, is information about the site, including a list of all of the publishers mentioned in the reviews, with links to their websites.
• Within the brown bar near the top of the page are links by type: Book reviews, exhibition reviews, essays, recent publications, and a Search box.

The search feature is good for simple searches, such as the name of a particular artist, movement, or even a location. If, for example, I wanted to see if there were any reviews or essays on the Met’s Venice in the Islamic World exhibit, I could type the words “Venice” and “Islamic” in the search box (commas aren’t necessary). You’ll see that there are seven results that contain these two words, and the first two are what we were looking for – a review of the exhibition catalogue and a review of the symposium that was held during the exhibit’s run.

Let’s take a closer look at the review of the Venice in the Islamic World catalogue. Every entry in caa.reviews follows this format: At the top, we have the date of the review and we have the title and publication information, including list price and ISBN. In the case of exhibitions, we also have the venues and dates with links to the institutions. Above and below the review text is the reviewer’s name with a link to a listing of their reviews.

(This link under the reviewer’s name – CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2008.29 - is known as a Digital Object Identifier Number, or DOI. The editors have included one with every article in caa.reviews to aid in future online archiving.)

In the Essays section, we find more reviews of symposia and a few art-related essays such as Surveying the “Long Nineteenth Century”: A Review of Art-History Textbooks in the Field.

The Recent Publications section provides a list by subject area of books published within the past twelve months. While there are no links, it’s easy to copy and paste a title to search it in WATSONLINE.  For example this book on French Art of the Eighteenth Century at the Huntington, which is in the Watson Library’s collection.

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Lastly, we’ll take a look at Oxford Art Online which is the new name for Grove Art Online

Grove Art Online recently underwent a major redesign and name change and is now called Oxford Art Online. The main components of this resource – The Grove Dictionary of Art and the Oxford Companion to Western Art – are still present. However, the search functionality and image databases are greatly improved, with many more images from institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also, Oxford Art Online now includes the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.

There are a number of different methods of searching this database:

• there is a Quick Search box at the top right of the page
• the box in the middle of the page searches the titles of articles in the database and allows you to restrict your search to a particular resource
• there is a box for searching the image database only
• and, there is an enhanced Advanced Search feature, which is linked just under the Quick Search box.

I should point out that those of you who are already very familiar with Grove Art Online, will find a handy pdf of tips to help explain the changes in Oxford Art Online under “What’s New”.

Let’s do a quick search for the artist J.M.W. Turner.

You’ll see that there are a number of results. Accompanying each entry is a descriptor in parentheses (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 the biography from Grove Art Online.

The navigation on the left provides you with hyper-linked access points to different parts of the article, so you can skip ahead to the parts you’re interested in – such as his Experiments with Colour and Technique. The last section in the left navigation is to a bibliography, which is a very good way to get started on further research, so let’s look at that a bit more closely. You will notice a “Find” button next to each bibliography entry. This is a link that will open in a new window and allow you to quickly search Watsonline for that item. For example, Turner the painter : his hidden life ; a frank and revealing biography, which is in the Watson Library’s collection.

As you’ll notice, 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 (and a warning about printing: the entire article is printed when you select this function.  If you only want a particular section, it’s best to first copy and paste it into MSWord or Notepad)

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 within Oxford Art Online that make mention of, or are related to our search term.

If we go back to our search results page for a moment, I’d like to point out that you can limit your results here before delving into an article. For example: If I were only interested in references to Turner in the Oxford Concise Dictionary, I could select that, click “go”, and I would be given an abbreviated list of results. Clicking on any of these would take me directly to the mention of Turner, which is conveniently highlighted. We can use the ‘back’ button, or simply uncheck the box and click ‘go’ again, to return to the full list of results.

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