Penn State University Libraries - ART 122Y: Commentary on Art

To find a good selection of articles on artists, you usually need to use a "periodical index." This indicates which articles are in what journals. Some periodical indexes contain the electronic text of the article, but the best ones for art do not. Instead The Penn State Libraries have installed a "Get It" button. When you find a description of an article in the periodical index, click the "Get It" button and a new window will open. It tries to find the electronic text of the article in the many sources we have for these. If it finds one, it gives you a hotlink to a source for the article. If it fails to find one, it offers to search The CAT for you, to locate a paper copy. The best periodical indexes for artists are:

• Art Abstracts and Art Index Retrospective. (a database on the Libraries web pages)
  This index lists articles in a variety of visual arts magazines and a few in related disciplines. Search it like you would The CAT. You seldom need to worry about common names (like Fred Wilson) since everything in the database is limited to the visual arts. A unique feature of this database: Watch out for the word "reproductions" in the results of your search. These are records describing pictures, not articles. They are usually gallery ads and often excellent quality pictures, with captions, but no magazine article. This database contains information for articles published from 1929 to the present.
  
  
• Artbibliographies Modern. (a database on the Libraries web pages)
  Covers articles on the visual arts of the late 19th century to the present. It indexes more articles of this type than Art Abstracts does. Includes things published as early as 1973. When you search an artist's name in this database the order of the words makes a difference. So to get all mentions of the name, enter it both ways (andy warhol or warhol, andy.)  

If the "Get It" button indicates that an article you want is not held at Penn State, click the "ILL" button (that stands for Inter-Library Loan) and a photocopy or image file will be obtained for you. This often takes 2 weeks, but sometimes only a few days.

There are many ways to find pictures of the artist's work. Some tips on finding all sorts of pictures are available in the Libraries' web page "Picture and Image Sources."

To get direct contact information for an artist, you can try:

• Web searches on the artist's name.
• Who's Who in American Art. N6536.W5 (ARTS & HUMANITIES, PATTEE, STACKS 2 - REFERENCE COLLECTION).
• Who's Who in Art. N40.W6 (ARTS & HUMANITIES, PATTEE, STACKS 2 - REFERENCE COLLECTION). 

Galleries that handle an artist's work know how to contact the artist (assuming the artists is alive.) To find the appropriate galleries try:

• Web searches on the artist's name.
• Art in America. Annual Guide to Galleries. N510.A78 (ARTS & HUMANITIES, PATTEE, 2ND FLOOR - READY REFERENCE).
• Art in Context: Center for Communications.  It's a good idea to do as much research as you can before contacting an artist. This helps you to get the most out of the interaction (not just repeating simple facts, etc.) You knowledge of the artist also demonstrates the sincerity of your request and is more likely to get a response.

Web search engines can 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:

• Search engines cannot see the contents of most academic databases. They are only designed to find html and similar "pages." They usually can’t retrieve the contents of databases such as library catalogs or Arts Abstracts or any of the nearly 400 databases that the University subscribes to. (There are a small number of exceptions to this rule. See for example Google Scholar, below.) 
  
  
• Most web resources are self-published and vary widely in quality, so you have more work to do in evaluating them than you would with other publications. Trade and academic publishers put effort into assuring the quality of their books and magazines in order to assure that they are profitable. Only a very small percentage of web sites attempt those standards. When you use web sites you are taking on extra responsibility for judging quality. Here are some points to consider when evaluating web sites: Authority • Who is the author of the piece? • Is the author the original creator of the information? • What is the author’s occupation, experience, position, education, or other credentials? Affiliation • What institution (company, organization, government, university, etc.) supports this information? • Does the institution appear to exercise quality control over the information? • Does the author's affiliation with this particular institution appear to bias the information? Currency • When was the information created or last updated? Purpose • What appears to be the purpose for this information? To inform? Explain? Persuade? Audience • Who is the intended audience? Compared to what? • What does this work/site offer compared to other works, including non-internet works? • Is the information in this site supported by other sources?
  
  
• Discourse communities can be difficult to identify on the Internet. The faculty in your department expect you to develop some understanding of their discourse community (those people who contribute to the knowledge of a particular discipline or topic.) A source like Artbibliographies Modern focuses on the publications where artists, critics, art dealers, and art historians publicly contribute to their field of study. While good contributions can also be found on the Internet they can be difficult to identify there because of the mix of hobbyists, entrepreneurs, and others contributing.
  
  
• Using search engines well requires skills that are very similar to the ones needed for searching databases. Because search engines scan millions of items, they almost always return some results even if very simple search statements are entered. But search engines usually have powerful features that are not invoked unless you specify them. Use the most unique terms that relate to your topic and learn how to search phrases – usually surrounded by quotes "like this." Learning to read and shorten URLs (web addresses) is an important skill. Another is choosing the right search engine for the right job. One easy way to learn some of these tricks quickly is to use the guide posted by a non-profit group called Infopeople. Their Search Tools Chart selects a small number of good search engines and web guides, explains what they are searching, and describes the search features of each. A more inclusive guide to search engines, and what jobs they are suited for, is Noodle Tools’ Choose the Best…  Try opening the Search Tools Chart or Noodle Tools in one window and experiment with different search engines and techniques in another.) Never settle for just one search. Experimentation is very important in web searching. For example, type any 3 unrelated search terms (frog metal wheat?) as a search statement in Google then change the order of the three terms a few times and see how the results of the search change. Or try Googlewhacking! (It’s a sport. Look it up.) Trial-and-error learning is especially important with search engines since search.
  
  
• Google is not the best choice for every task. Some new search engines have specialties which can make them much more effective than Google for a particular need. Here are some examples related to academic research:
  
  
• A9.com's Open Search
  This convenient "aggregator" or "meta-search engine" run by Amazon.com searches several sources simultaneously and returns the results in separate columns running down the screen. Featured sources at present are Wikipedia, a general search engine (Live.com), the Internet Movie Database, the Amazon book database, a blend of free reference sources, etc. You can also select from hundreds of others. The speed is impressive.
  
  
• Yippy
  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. A similar search engine called KartOO takes this clustering approach further by creating malleable animations of the clusters
  
  
• Google Book Search
  This is a very important project. Google has been working with large research libraries (like Penn State) 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. Sometimes you can see every page of the book. Even though only a fraction of the planned books are completed, search results can be very impressive for some topics. Only a bit of this content seems to appear through regular Google searches.
  
  
• 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 Google 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 a collection of most American library catalogs 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 find an article in one of Penn State’s electronic journals. However, it only can see a handful of the more than 400 database the library has and it is very weak in its coverage of the arts. Also, we have discovered that Google Scholar, still labeled a "beta" test after 3 years, is very incomplete. For example, sometimes it finds one article in an electronic journal, but not another in the same journal – even though both should be available. It is very useful, but don’t trust it.
  
  
• Marketleap Link Popularity Check 
  If you have found a web site that is of particular value to your research, you can use specialized search engine tools to determine what other web sites have linked to it. This one returns the results from some major search engines. Type in the URL of the site you are interested in and follow the instructions. The software creates a table of results with the results for your site in the top row. That row shows the number of linking web sites found on each of the search engines. Click on the numbers to see the actual list of web sites. Something similar may be done in Google ("link:[url]") but this only returns results from Google.

Search Techniques in Selected Art Education Databases (PDF)

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