AMD121: Pre-20th Century Art History: Articles & Databases

After searching books, you will want to look for scholarly articles. There are differences between the two types of materials. Books will deal in depth with a topic or artist, where articles are much more narrow in focus. Also, because of their publication strategies, there are a LOT more articles to wade through in a result set than a book search. Just saying!

CSUSM offers you several ways to get to articles.

• Specific databases--you need to know which ones to search and here is a list to start:

  • Art Full Text (the name says it all, but there will be a mix of scholarly and popular materials) 

  • JSTOR (scholarly, full text general database)

  • Project Muse (scholarly, full text, general database)

  • ProQuest - Arts (much of this is popular press, rather than scholarly, but still has useful content)

  • Historical Abstracts (for the history topics research, rather than specific art work)
• Articles+ Search--this searches a number of databases, but can bring back a lot of unrelated materials to look through.
• Discovery Search--searches our books, videos and articles in one search. Problem is there will be even more that won't be relevant to your needs to look through.

Here is an example of a search in Art Full Text database:

Tip: There are a lot of ways to do searches, this is a basic set of steps. See your librarian for more.