Arts & Humanities Library
W320 Pattee Library
Penn State University
Phone: 814-865-6778
This bibliography selects and describes reference materials which may be of use to graduate students in Art Education 502, Research in Art Education, as they conduct the library and Internet portions of their thesis research. It contains many standard sources for art education, but also includes many related to the topics specified by the Fall, 2008 class which touch upon art practice, creativity, digital environments, environmental education, ethnicity, gender, museum studies, philosophy, popular culture, and rural sociology. This list of reference books, databases, and websites is organized by types of tools. Each section begins with an explanation of the type because an understanding of these formats for reference resources can help when your projects take you into some other field of study. The names of these formats are not used consistently by publishers and librarians, nor are the names important. But understanding the type of tool, and how it can be used, is useful indeed. Some formats are: Fast Starts, Locations and Quick Facts.
People can give you both kinds of information at once: locations and quick facts. The faculty, other students, and librarians can be good sources. I'd be happy to help. See my contact information and get in touch with me.
The purpose of a guide to research (also called a bibliographic guide) is the same as this document, to help you determine which reference books, databases, web sites, and similar resources might be useful for your work. Web guides (also called metasites, links pages, etc.) usually aim to help you determine which Internet sites might be most useful for your research.
Specialized encyclopedias are fine places to get a quick start on solving many kinds of problems. They synthesize a lot of other published information. Reading a brief summary of a topic, at the beginning of your exploration, can help you make better choices as your research progresses. The best encyclopedias refer you to the essential literature on each subject (usually with brief bibliographies at the end of each entry.) Many large encyclopedias have entries on general topics, and access to more specific subjects through an index at the back. The specialized encyclopedias below feature articles signed by recognized authorities and contain well-chosen lists for further reading. Although the words are often used interchangeably, I am making a distinction between “encyclopedia” and “dictionary”, reserving the latter for books that simply define terms without providing much discussion or recommended readings. Handbooks are useful in a way that is similar to specialized encyclopedias. Handbooks are composed of a series of essays intended to survey best practices in a particular profession or field of study. They are organized less rigidly than encyclopedias (not alphabetically) and the bibliographies are usually more extensive.
Web search engines can also provide fast starts on a research problem. In fact, in a few short years World Wide Web search engines have become the most popular tools by far for finding information because they are convenient, can be used without much skill, and frequently produce useful results. Remember these 5 important points about search engines:
- Yippee (formerly Clusty). This search engine clusters the results into groups based on their similarity. So the hundreds of results from a term like "architecture" are grouped into categories such as: architects, schools, networking, software, etc. Searches can be focused on images, blogs, and other forms.
- Google Book Search. This is a very important project. Google has been working with large research libraries to digitize books in their collections. Google has also been working with a number of publishers regarding the texts of their books. A large number of books has already been posted with Google-style searching of their complete texts. Usually you can read a passage from the book that contains your keywords. Often you can read all of the passages in the book that contain the words. Even though only a fraction of the planned books are completed, search results can be very impressive for some topics.
Google Image Search. Becoming the first place most people go for pictures. The most common complaint is that the picture retrieved is too small. Sometimes it helps to use the advance search features to limit to larger sizes.
- Google Scholar. Also important. Uses the technology of the Google search engine but tries to concentrate on reliable sources that meet scholarly expectations for quality. It seems to do this in two ways: 1) By focusing on the official postings of research organizations and university departments. 2) By taking advantage of a new protocol for making the contents of a few databases visible to Google. The databases selected for inclusion include World Cat (#93) and also include a few of the databases of electronic journals that we subscribe to at Penn State. By connecting to these resources, Google Scholar can offer to search the Penn State library catalog for you or can find an article in one of Penn State's electronic journals. However, it only can see a handful of the more than 400 databases the library has. Also, we have discovered that Google Scholar, still a beta test, is very incomplete. For example, sometimes it finds one article in an electronic journal, but not another even though both should be available. It is very useful, but don't trust it.
Of course library catalogs contain records describing the books they own. Note that most library catalogs only have a single record for each magazine title; they do not include records for each of the articles in a magazine. (For that, see the section on Periodical Indexes below.) But in addition to books and magazines, library catalogs may contain records for archival materials, audio-visual materials, vertical file ephemera, software, and even selected web sites.
Periodical indexes (sometimes called "abstracts”) are designed to direct readers to articles and reviews in magazines and journals. Each of the ones listed in this section can be used to find articles on a particular topic or by a particular author. Abstracts are simply periodical indexes which include a few sentences summarizing the contents of each article indexed. In most of our electronic periodical indexes, you will see a “Get It” button next to the description of a specific article. Click “Get It” and the software will determine if Penn State has access to an electronic version of the article, will look the magazine up in The CAT, or will offer to place the information about the article in an Inter-Library Loan request for you. When the “Get It” button is not available, check the title of each magazine in The CAT to find out if it is held in our library and to get the classification number so that you can find it on the shelves. Although this type of tool always emphasizes journal articles, some of them also index a selection of dissertations, exhibition catalogs, collections of essays, and other types of books. When they contain lots of these other types of publications the term “current bibliography” is often used rather than “periodical index”.
Citation indexes are a special type of periodical index. They index a magazine article three ways: by its author, by the keywords in its title, and also through each of the footnotes from the article. This data is made searchable by author and, to some extent, by title. If you have a publication which is important to your research, you could use a citation index to find more recent articles which have cited it. This can be a good way to find responses to the important publication. Also, specific mention of a work of art is treated like a footnote (whether or not a footnote is used). So this can also be a good tool for locating articles that mention a particular art object. Both the paper and online versions of the citation indexes are a little tricky to use. It's a good idea to ask for help the first time you try.
For roughly a decade, many libraries and archives have been digitizing portions of their collections and posting them on the web. Because of copyright considerations, these efforts have usually focused upon special collections -- rare and archival materials. Many digital library collections are heavily pictorial. Historic photos, popular illustration, posters, and other visual ephemera are often found in these collections. Unfortunately access to these resources is still disorganized -- scattered across the web sites of each library. Since this information is usually organized in databases, it is often invisible to web search engines. (Search engines can index the contents of web pages, but not usually the records within a database.) The sources below attempt to provide access to multiple digital library collections.
The Special Collections Library at Penn State has unusually strong holdings for the history of art education. These collections would probably not be useful for your current projects but I list them because we are proud of them and because they might generate ideas for future projects.
Other archival materials relating to art education appear in the papers of Professor of Art Edwin W. Zoller; psychologist C.R. Carpenter; art education televised instruction developed by WPSX-TV's Center for Instructional Design; photographs in the University Archives general academic photo files under “Art Education” and portrait files under the names of various faculty members; pamphlet and other print materials in the University Archives “general vertical files” under “Art Education” in academic and summer session files; and 1963 and 1977 program review documentation for the Art Education graduate and undergraduate programs at Penn State. In the library stacks and the Music and Media Center, the Libraires have a somewhat rare complete run of the Bulletin and later Journal of the Caucus on Social Theory and Art Education (1980 to present.)
Some references to doctoral dissertations can be found in library catalogs and many periodical indexes. However some resources focus specifically on dissertations and are more thorough. When selecting a thesis topic, doctoral students are frequently asked to verify that the topic has not been handled in an earlier dissertation and that it is not currently chosen by another student. These are the main sources to check in that case:
Since only one or two copies of each dissertation is collected in a library, some libraries choose not to lend them through Inter-Library Loan. The publishers of Dissertations & Theses: A&I offer fairly inexpensive copies of the dissertations in their database in a variety of media (paper, microfiche, or electronic). Other sources for electronic copies (some free) are listed in a library guide posted at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/researchguides/dissertations.html.
There are many ways to find a particular picture or a type of picture in books or on the Internet. Some useful techniques are listed on the University Libraries web pages at:
In writing a paper for publication, authors must adhere to a style manual which indicates how the many variables of writing should be handled to create a useful consistency in the publication. The Chicago Manual of Style is perhaps the most detailed style manual. Most style manuals focus on the details of how to format footnotes and bibliographies and these include the APA Style and the MLA Style Manual. Art education scholars publish in a variety of venues, so any of these style manuals might be required. If your writing is criticized, read:
Search Techniques in Selected Art Education Databases (PDF)
You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer in order to access the PDF file. If you wish to download a free copy of the Adobe Reader you may do so at the link below:
