LibGuides: PL 234: Home

Art Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

Oxford / Grove Art Online The best place to start for researching artists, styles, and historical art topics of all kinds.
American National Biography Online An ESSENTIAL source for researching major 19th century American artists, with well-researched, comprehensive biographies, location of primary sources, and links to more info.
Arts Dictionaries in Credo Reference Library Brief and quick info on artists and terms in art, searching across a variety of quality art dictionaries
Encyclopedia Smithsonian Search across all textual and visual information of the Smithsonian Museums, including the Archives of American Art.
The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics

How to Use this Guide

Start with an encyclopedia or dictionary (box at left) to find biographies and dates of artists, definitions of art terms, background on cultures or styles.
Use Subject terms and phrases to help you find relevant books in CBBcat.
Search for scholarly articles or newspaper opinion pieces in databases below. In particular: search for artistic movements and for individual artists in Philosophers' Index.
Look for more links under the tabs at the top of the screen.

Ask a librarian: Margaret Ericson, Arts Librarian (mericson@colby.edu) or Karen Gillum (kjgillum@colby.edu)

Art Source
Art Source is international in scope, and is designed for use by a diverse audience, including art scholars, artists, designers, students and general researchers.

ARTbibliographies Modern
Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogs, PhD dissertations, and exhibition reviews on all forms of modern and contemporary art. Entries date back as far as the late 1960s.

Bibliography of the History of Art
From the Getty Research Institute, a comprehensive index (1975-2007) to art books, periodical articles, essays on art, conference proceedings, & dissertations. International in scope, covering all historical periods and cultures.

International Bibliography of Art
Successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art, this new database continues indexing and abstracting of scholarly publications (books, articles, essays, etc.) in all the visual arts from all historical periods in an international context.

JSTOR
JSTOR is an archive of leading scholarly journals across the humanities and social sciences. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, and is interlinked by citations and references. For most titles, holdings do not include the last 5 years.

Search this database with abstract terms, including "art", artistic movements, and individual artists.

ProQuest Newsstand™ offers access to the full text of over 1300 newspapers, news websites and blogs.