Art 92.02 : Public Art in the U.S.
Spring 2008
GENERAL SOURCES | ENCYCLOPEDIAS, DICTIONARIES | INDEXES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES | JOURNAL ARTICLES | INTERNET RESOURCES
General Sources
One of the best places to start research is in the computerized Five-College Library Catalog. All books are listed by their AUTHORS (last name first), TITLES (drop initial articles "the", "a", "an"), and SUBJECTS, and you can also use the KEYWORD function to search.
KEYWORD searching is not likely to yield a complete list of locally-owned books on any particular topic, but it's a good way to start; type in a common language characterization of your topic, say "environmental art ", select titles from the resulting list that interest you, note which official subject headings are assigned to those titles, then click on them to do a more thorough SUBJECT search.
SUBJECT searching, as such, requires that you use the exact word or phrase libraries have chosen to describe your topic. For example, libraries list books about environmental art under the subject headings "Environment (Art)" and also under "Earthworks (Art)". Ask at the Reference Desk if you're not sure what words or phrases to use.
For books about a particular artist, it's recommended that you look up the artist's name as both AUTHOR and SUBJECT.
For quick background information, try the Britannica Online from any computer on campus; just click on the colored link.
Encyclopedias, Dictionaries
The Dictionary of Art. New York, Grove's Dictionaries,
1996. 34 volumes.
This basic encyclopedia includes entries on artists (short
biographies), topics, terms, etc. Many articles have brief bibliographies
appended. (Ref N 31 D5 1996) The
Dictionary of Art (click here to connect) is also available
online from any Amherst computer.
The Britannica Encyclopedia of American Art. New
York, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1973.
A one-volume, well-illustrated encyclopedia with concise entries
on artists, topics, etc.; inadequate bibliographical information at back
of book. (Ref xN 6505 B73)
The Encyclopedia of Sculpture. New York, Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2004; 3 volumes.
Basic biographical information on major and minor figures;
no bibliographies. (Ref N 6536 F5 1986)
Dictionary of American History. New York, Scribner's,
1976; 8 volumes + 2 volume supplement.
The most authoritative and complete encyclopedia of American
history; check here for concise information on people, places, events
of significance. (Ref E 174 A43 1976)
Encyclopedia of American Cultural & Intellectual History. New
York, Scribner's, 2001; 3 volumes.
An excellent collection of essays (with short bibliographies)
on major topics in American cultural history, including, in vol. 3, "Monuments
and Memorials", "Public Murals", and "Sculpture".
(Ref E 169.1 E624 2001)
Indexes, Bibliographies
Subject bibliographies and indexes, which list books and/or
articles on particular topics, can lead you to substantial reading lists
in your area of research; they are useful even when older and not including
citations to current publications; online indexes enable you to update.
A few potentially useful titles among printed bibliographies include the multi-volume Arts
in America (Ref Z 5961 U5 A77...vol. 1 includes citations
to works about sculpture, vol. 2 covers painting, vol.4 is an index to
topics and artists), American Sculpture (Ref Z 5954 U5 E37), The
New Deal Fine Arts Projects (Ref Z 5961 U5 K36 1994), and Earth Scale Art (Ref N 6494 E27 H3). To locate topical
bibliographies, use the SUBJECT category in the Library Catalog, guess
at KEYWORD(s), and/or ask at the Reference Desk.
Online indexes are computerized listings of journal articles and/or books,
searchable, usually, by authors, titles, keywords, and subjects. Connect
from the colored links below. Recommended resources are: Art
Abstracts (for citations to articles published from 1984 to the
present) and Art
Index Retrospective (for items published between 1929 and 1983),
the Avery
Index to Architectural Periodicals, and America:
History and Life. Academic
Search Premier and Expanded
Academic Index are much more general in their coverage,
but include direct links to many electronic full-texts. Also full-text
is LEXIS-NEXIS,
which provides access to articles from major newspapers.
A Few Words about Journal Articles
Printed and computerized indexes and bibliographies provide
citations to journal articles which may or may not be owned by the Amherst
College Library. To find out if and where we have a backfile of a particular
journal, you must look up each journal title (not article titles or authors)
in the Library
Catalog. Be attentive to volume numbers and dates since sometimes
we've started or stopped a subscription in the middle of a run.
Some older volumes of journals may be housed in the Amherst College Depository,
an off-campus storage facility. You can request volumes from the Depository
by filling out a brief form which appears onscreen when you select 'Request
Forms' from the Library Homepage, then click on 'Depository'; materials will be delivered
to the Circulation Desk in Frost the next weekday.
More and more journals are offering full-texts in electronic form; those
we subscribe to are linked to records in the online Library Catalog and
you can connect via a JOURNAL TITLE search. Also, when using electronic
indexes (like Art Abstracts or America: History and Life),
a button labeled "AC Links" now permits you to search automatically
for electronic versions of articles you find cited; if the Library does
not have access to an electronic version, "AC Links" will automatically
search for a print-format version in the Library Catalog.
Internet Resources
The Library Homepage provides reasonably
direct, organized access to Internet resources like library catalogs
in the U.S. and abroad, search engines for finding particular sites, and
from the 'Subject and Course Guides' tile on the left side of the LIbrary's homepage,
then Art or American
Studies, to meta-sites, image collections, etc.
Public arts are well represented on the World Wide Web. Art
Crimes: The Writing on the Wall, for instance, is an extraordinary
site documenting graffiti worldwide, and American
Memory offers over seven million digitized items from more than
100 historical collections at the U.S. Library of Congress, some of which
might be relevant for your research. For Web searching, try using a good
search engine like Google, but be as specific as possible when entering
search terms, and be a bit cautious about the response. If you can, figure
out who’s sponsoring and authoring the information, when the information
was collected, and what criteria were used for including particular information.
Look around a site and, if such evidence isn’t fairly clearly displayed,
be especially skeptical; it doesn’t mean the information’s bad,
just that it may not be verifiable.
Do you have questions about research in this course? Contact Michael Kasper