LibGuides: Richardson Memorial Library: Databases

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Yale's eBooks

A&Ae Portal
Yale University's eBook resource featuring authoritative scholarship in the history of art, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and design.

Images

African and Asian Visual Artists Archive 140,000 images from over 300 British art and design collections, free for use in education.
Frick Digital Collections The Frick Museum's collection of > one million photographic reproductions of western European and American works of art, 4th to mid-20th centuries.
National Gallery of Art Library Image Collections Access to nearly 16 million photographic images from the NGA's Library. Focus is on western art and architecture, with strengths related to American, Dutch, French, and Italian art; the arts of Asia; and the architecture of France, Italy, and Germany.
Warburg Institute Iconographic Database Digital copies from the photo collection and library of the Warburg Institute, London. Research for iconographic keywords and iconographic classification as well as artist, location and date.

Vocabularies

Art & Architecture Thesaurus® Online Thesaurus containing generic terms, dates, relationships, sources, and notes for work types, roles, materials, styles, cultures, techniques, and other concepts related to art, architecture, and other cultural heritage.
Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) Electronic publication, the guidelines and cataloging rules for the description of art, architecture, and other cultural works. CDWA advises which fields and categories in art metadata are appropriate for the use of vocabularies. CDWA represents common practice and advises best practice for cataloging, based on surveys and consensus building with the user community.
Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA)® Compiles titles/names and other metadata for works of art, architecture, and other cultural works, current and historical, documented as items or in groups, whether works are extant, destroyed, or never built; in development, may be used to record works depicted in visual surrogates and for other purposes.
Getty Iconography Authority (IA)™ Thesaurus covering topics relevant to art, architecture, and related disciplines; includes multilingual proper names, relationships, and dates for iconographical narratives, religious or fictional characters, themes, historical events, and named literary works and performing arts
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)® TGN is a thesaurus that may be linked to GIS and maps. Focuses on places relevant to art, architecture, and related disciplines, recording names, relationships, place types, dates, notes, and coordinates for current and historical cities, nations, empires, archaeological sites, lost settlements, and physical features.
Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)® Contains names, relationships, notes, sources, and biographical information for artists, architects, firms, studios, repositories, patrons, and other individuals and corporate bodies, both named and anonymous.

Subscription Databases

This list includes various online resources, including image and full-text databases, indexes, and vocabularies. Resources are selected based on use by staff, volunteers, and the general public.

For a full list of databases, see Databases A–Z

Ancestry Library Edition Expansive resource for conducting genealogy or historic property research. Has approximately 4,000 databases including key collections such as U.S. Federal Census images & indexes from 1790 to 1940; the Map Center containing more than 1,000 historical maps; American Genealogical Biographical Index; Social Security Death Index; WWI Draft Registration Cards; and Federal Slave Narratives.
Anthropology Plus Includes the Anthropological Index Online and Anthropological Literature databases, providing an extensive index of bibliographic materials covering the fields of anthropology, archaeology and related interdisciplinary research. Offers worldwide indexing of all core periodical and lesser-known journals from the 18th century to today, providing source indexing for journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works and obituaries.
Artkhade Provides auction sale (1920s–present) and provenance information with images for all types of fine art and other objects, as well as arms and armor, weapons, musical instruments, and games. Its focus is on Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Artnet Price Databases Artnet includes two auction price databases: one for fine arts and design and one for decorative arts. These include records from over 500 auction houses since 1985. Over half of the records are illustrated. Search options include artist (for fine arts and design), medium or object type, and auction house or gallery.
Resource functionality is best on-site.
Art & Architecture Source Covers fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as architecture and design, with full-text art journals, magazines and books, plus detailed indexing and abstracts and thousands of images. 1928-
AskArt Information on over 270,000 artists. Information varies in depth, but may include biographical, book, and periodical references; auction records; museums that own artwork; and images.
Black Newspapers (1893–2010) Full-text database that provides researchers with first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of politics, society and events published in multiple Black newspapers.
Brill's New Pauly Encyclopedia for the study of Greco-Roman culture and its influence on modern world history.
Chicago Manual of Style Online The Chicago Manual of Style Online (CMOS) is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Indispensable reference to style, usage, and grammar for writers, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers. SLAM's style standard.
Encyclopædia Britannica The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia which is now published exclusively online. Subscription includes access to Merriam-Webster Unabridged.
FirstSearch-WorldCat Subscription-based tool for searching OCLC WorldCat bibliographic records.
JSTOR 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, Artstor images, and primary sources.
The most recent 3–5 years of journals are generally not available; this is known as a "moving wall."
Merriam-Webster Unabridged Merriam-Webster Unabridged is the largest online authority for American English usage. Subscription includes access to Encyclopædia Britannica.
Newspapers.com World Collection Access to 4,000+ historical newspapers dating from the early 1700s into the 2000s. The database contains full runs and portions of runs of well-known regional and state titles as well as small local newspapers from the United States and other countries. Due to third-party content agreements, most access is restricted to public domain content.
Oxford Art Online Oxford’s art reference works, including the peer-reviewed, regularly updated Grove® Dictionary of Art and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Includes over 200,000 articles that span ancient to contemporary art and architecture, as well as over 19,000 images of works of art, structures, plans, and artist signatures.
Oxford English Dictionary Regarded as the leading authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.
ProQuest Art, Design & Architecture Collection A comprehensive survey of current publications in the fields of visual and applied arts, the Art, Design & Architecture Collection includes ProQuest's specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design & Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts), and International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals from ProQuest's Arts & Humanities Database..
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Library of Congress repository for dissertations & theses, with comprehensive and ongoing coverage for North American universities and expanding global coverage.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1874–2003) Full-text database that provides researchers with first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of politics, society and events published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Indexes

Abstracts of International Conservation Literature Contains abstracts of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage. Includes over 148,000 records. Approximately 4,000 new records added annually.
Anthropology Plus Includes the Anthropological Index Online and Anthropological Literature databases, providing an extensive index of bibliographic materials covering the fields of anthropology, archaeology and related interdisciplinary research. Offers worldwide indexing of all core periodical and lesser-known journals from the 18th century to today, providing source indexing for journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works and obituaries.
Art & Architecture Source Covers fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as architecture and design, with full-text art journals, magazines and books, plus detailed indexing and abstracts and thousands of images. 1928-
Art Inventories Catalog References over 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Over 21,000 painters and nearly 15,000 sculptors are represented. Records are compiled from a variety of sources including published catalogues, collection checklists, reports from collectors, journals, and magazines. The records include basic descriptive information on each artwork, including artist, title, execution date, dimensions, markings and inscriptions, subject, owner, and location.
Bibliografía Mesoamericana Provides a comprehensive and continually updated bibliographic dataset of the published literature pertaining to the anthropology of Mesoamerica. Content includes archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, art history, linguistics, physical anthropology, and other related disciplines.
Bibliographic Database of the Conservation Information Network (BCIN) Expansive bibliographic resource for the conservation, preservation, and restoration of cultural property.
Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) BHA and RILA cover European and American visual arts material including articles from over 1,200 journals. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007.
FirstSearch-WorldCat Subscription-based tool for searching OCLC WorldCat bibliographic records.
Getty Provenance Index® Provides access to archival inventories, sales catalogs, and dealer stock books. Updated with new site May 2025.
MOBIUS Online Catalog Integrated online catalog for MOBIUS consortium libraries.
Print Council Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues of Prints by European and American Artists Online edition of The Print Council Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues of Prints by European and American Artists by Timothy A. Riggs, expanded and updated by Lauren B. Hewes and Nicole Simpson. The database now contains entries for European and American prints, print publishers, drawings, and photographs; and Japanese prints and photographs.
ProQuest Art, Design & Architecture Collection A comprehensive survey of current publications in the fields of visual and applied arts, the Art, Design & Architecture Collection includes ProQuest's specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design & Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts), and International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals from ProQuest's Arts & Humanities Database..
Répertoire d'Art et d'Archéologie Numérisé The database enables research in digitized volumes of the "Répertoire d'Art et d'Archéologie" for the years 1910 - 1972. Includes 450,000 bibliographical references from art historical and archaeological journals, monographs and sales and auction catalogs of international origin.
WorldCat Union catalog that itemizes the collections of 15,600 libraries in 107 countries that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. SLAM is an OCLC network library.

Richardson Memorial Library: Databases