Library Art & the History of Art 270/BLST 293

• Gale Virtual Reference Library
  70 reference e-books, including multivolume works like the Encyclopedia of Religion, American Decades, and more.
• Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History
  Articles surveying all aspects of the black diaspora; strongest on U.S.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the present
  Essays on all aspects of recent African American history: people, events, places, etc.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895
  Surveys of all aspects of black history from the arrival of the first African slaves through the 19th century.
• Oxford Art Online
  Oxford Art Online is the access point for Grove Art Online, and other Oxford art reference works covering all forms of the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic and decorative arts, and photography from prehistory to the present.
• African Studies Thesaurus
  A structured vocabulary of more than 12500 English terms in the field of African studies. Developed and maintained by staff at the library of the African Studies Centre Leiden. Useful for defining and contextualizing terms.
• Oxford Islamic Studies Online
  Interdisciplinary reference content and commentary, plus Quranic materials, primary sources, images, maps, and timelines. Includes Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World and other core reference works on Islam.
• African-American Mosaic
  A Library of Congress resource guide for the study of Black history and culture
• Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
  Timeline which connects the Metropolitan's collections to chronologies, and contextual essays.

Print Reference Sources:

Arts of Africa: An Annotated Bibliography

Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures

Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought

Africana: the Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience

• ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM) (1974 to present)
  Citations to and abstracts of journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogs, dissertations, and exhibition reviews on all forms of modern and contemporary art; some entries date back as far as the late 1960s.
• JSTOR
  Full-text backfiles of over two thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. (Alumni access)
• Black Studies Center (25,000 BC to present)
  Black Studies Center is a tool that supports research, teaching, and learning in Black Studies covering aspects of the black experience such as history, literature, political science, sociology, philosophy, and religion.
• World Heritage Sites: Africa
  Digital resource covering the archaeology, history and culture of Africa through its heritage sites and landscape
• Index Islamicus (1906 to present)
  Covers literature on Islam, the Middle East and the Muslim world, including Muslim areas of Asia and Africa.
• Project Muse
  Online database of more than 200 journals from nonprofit publishers. (Alumni access)
• Historical Abstracts with Full Text (1955 to present)
  Scholarly literature about world history since 1450 (excluding the United States and Canada).
• AnthroSource (1988 to present)
  Developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), AnthroSource indexes 100 years of anthropological material.

• Fowler Museum at UCLA
  The Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora collection at the Fowler Museum is one of the world's premier collections of African art.
• Museum for African Art
  The Museum for African Art is dedicated to the arts and cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora.
• National Museum of African Art
  This site is a great resource for images, and you can connect to the catalog of the Warren M. Robbins Library. The library "...is the major resource center in the world for the research and study of the visual arts of Africa. It houses more than 32,000 volumes on African art, history and culture."
• Smithsonian Institution Collection
  Search over six million records with 536,000 images, video and sound files and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives, and libraries.
• Museum of the African Diaspora
  Exhibitions focusing on the African Diapora across history
• Archives Nationales d'Haiti - Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
  The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
• National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian)
• Searchable images, data, and robust contextual information.
• Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology
• Collections from Nigeria and other areas of West and Central Africa, including wood sculpture, basketry and pottery, musical instruments, brass castings and other metalwork, and textiles. The largest single cultural collection comes from the Yoruba of Nigeria—numbering about 1,300 items—making it one of the largest and most comprehensive in North America.
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
• Brooklyn Museum
• Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tips for finding books in the Five College Library Catalog

Try searching by subject keyword. Some examples of subject searches:

Art--Haiti
Art, Haitian
Artists--Haiti
Painting--Haiti

Don't forget to use the subject headings from books you've already found!

Title Keywords to search in Five College Catalog to find reference texts

bibliography                         atlas
dictionary                             encyclopedia
guide                                     history

A note on searching for exhibition catalogs
Almost all Five College Library catalog records for exhibition catalogs contain the word "exhibitions," either as a subject term, or in the description. To find a catalog focused on a specific artist or topic, perform a keyword search that includes the artist's name (last name is often enough) or the topic word(s), and the word exhibition* (using the truncation symbol * searches for both the word exhibition and the subject term exhibitions). 

Helpful name and vocubulary resources:

Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)
Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)
Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)

• ARTstor
  Image database including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture.
• Amherst College Digital Collections
  Digitized art works, photographs, manuscripts, books, and other media from Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and the library’s Art & Architecture Collection.

• Five Colleges Museums Collections Database
  Images of and information about catalogued works from the collections of museums in the Pioneer Valley, including the Mead Art Museum at Amherst, Hampshire College Art Gallery, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Joseph Allen Skinner Museum of Mount Holyoke College, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Also see online museum collections in the Web Resources tab.

Slides from library session: 

African Art and the Diaspora.pdf

African Art and the Diaspora.pdf