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Art History Research: Resources

Art History Research Tips

Free Online Image Databases

Google Arts & Culture - Google Arts & Culture is an online platform of high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world.

Calisphere - Calisphere is a gateway to digital collections from California's great libraries, archives, and museums. Discover over 1,975,000 images, texts, and recordings—and counting.

Europeana - Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research.

Artstor Public Collections - Artstor’s ever-growing Public Collections offer approximately 1.3 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from partner museums. Anyone may view and download these collections; no subscription or login required.

Getty Open Content Images - The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids.

ArtUK - Discover over 270,000 artworks from the UK's national collection. You can search for artists, or for galleries and museums.

Open Arts Archive - a live and open archive providing free access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, including talks, seminars, study days, artists’ podcasts, artist interviews, curators’ talks and exhibitions.

Finding Peer-Reviewed Books and Articles

JSTOR - JSTOR is a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources. (Access database with your library card)

Academic Search Premier - A popular resource found in many scholarly settings worldwide, Academic Search Premier is a leading multidisciplinary research database. It provides acclaimed full-text journals, magazines and other valuable resources. (Access database with your library card)

Historical New York Times - This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time. (Access database with your library card)

HathiTrust Digital Library - HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

Google Scholar - Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Art News Sources

ARTnews - ARTnews has been tracking the development of visual, contemporary, ancient and international art since 1902.

JSTOR Daily - JSTOR Daily is an online magazine meant to bring academic research to a broader audience. 

Hyperallergic - Hyperallergic is a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today.

Artnet News - Artnet is the art world online. Find artworks for sale, online auctions, top galleries, leading artists, and breaking art market news from around the globe.

NY Times Arts - The Arts section of the NY Times is considered the authority on art news, especially pertaining to the New York City art scene.

The Art Newspaper - The Art Newspaper a journal of record for the visual arts world, covering international news and events.

Juxtapoz - Juxtapoz Magazine was created in 1994 by a group of artists and art collectors to both help define and celebrate urban alternative and underground contemporary art.

Link to Art Heists that Made History resource guide series