AD100: Art & Design Experience

Professor Diane Jarvi

Instruction Provided by Rachel O. Jorgensen

Library Resource Guide

The Library Catalog and the Library Home Page

Olson Library provides many resources for your use, including its own catalog of materials, as well as access to other electronic databases in which you can find journal articles, image collections and reference resources. You can have access to all of these resources anywhere you have an internet connection. If required to log-in just use your Webmail ID and password.

Olson Library Homepage: This is the page that you can use to navigate to any of the resources Olson Library provides for you, including e-books, full-text articles and on-line reference works.

Olson Library Catalog: Use the library catalog to find books, audio-visual materials, government documents, e-books and journal titles.

A Note on Finding Articles vs. Books

Many students get confused by where to look for journal/magazine articles and books. In order to find magazine/journal articles, you must use an article database. Individual articles are not listed in the Library Catalog; only the titles of magazines and journals are listed in the Library Catalog. If you need to find magazine or journal articles and don't know where to look come up to the Reference Desk in the Olson Library and a reference librarian will help you figure out what to do.

Article Databases

To find journal articles for your art and art history courses there are two article databases that are particularly helpful. These are: JSTOR and Humanities Abstracts.

JSTOR: Complete, searchable, full text articles from over 1,000 core scholarly journals. 1878 to the most recent 1-5 years (varies by title).

Humanities Abstracts: Journal articles in the humanities. This includes archaeology, art, classics, film, history, music, performing arts, philosophy, religion, literature, and more. 1984 to present; abstracts since 1994.

Image Databases

ArtStor: ArtStor is an incredible image database ArtStor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images. Make your life easier and use ArtStor to find images for your art and art history papers.

On-Line Reference Resources

Reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias, timelines, "companions") are a particularly good resource when you're studying art and art history. These types of resources provide information about the historical, cultural and religious context of an art work that you're studying or doing research on.

History Reference Resources: This is a list of on-line reference resources that are available to you in the area of history. These types of resources can give you a lot of good background information.

New York Public Library's Digital Collection Per the Library's website, this digital image collection contains over 700,000 digitized images of objects ranging from photography, maps, illuminated manuscripts, ephemera and prints, to name just a few.

Keyword Searching

Keyword searching is a fundamental research skill and is used in all types of databases, from the library catalog to Google. These searches are important because they allow you to find materials without knowing the title or author. Basically, keyword searches use words that describe the integral concept of your subject - multiple terms can be combined in one search, allowing you to find very specific materials, or very general ones, depending on your needs.

Remember, you have to command the database to do the search in a particular way -- the way that will provide you with relevant search results. This is done by combining keywords using the Boolean Operators and, or, not.

AND: Retrieves all terms.

OR: Retrieves items that have either one of two search terms.

NOT: Tells the database to ignore records that have a certain term. Ex: Twins not Minnesota. This search would retrieve articles that have the term "twins," as in the biological phenomena, not the baseball team.

Confused? Justin Bloom at the University of Nevada, Reno does a good job of defining these terms at the Mathewson--IGT Knowledge Center.

General Guidelines:

1. Write a thesis or subject statement.

2. Use the words in this statement to create a keyword list.

3. Include synonyms in your list, in order to facilitate your searches.

4. Don't do just one keyword search. Do several.

5. Ask for help.

MLA Style Guide

The MLA Style Guide ("MLA" stands for Modern Language Association) defines how you do the citations and works cited for your paper. Some instructors may also have you use the formatting guidelines (margins, line spacing, etc.) that are given in the Style Guide, as well. TO SAVE YOURSELF TIME AND AGGRAVATION, ALWAYS FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE MLA STYLE GUIDE.

Quick Reference MLA Style Guide. This on-line guide is a good place to go to get general information on how to do a citation, but you should get into the habit of consulting the actual book. Copies are available at the Olson Library (call no. LB2369.G53 2009). If you need help with formatting, works cited or in-text citations, you can always come up to the Reference Desk for help.

Need Help?

If you're having problems finding materials for your assignment and want to ask a librarian for help, just come up to the reference desk. Or, you can get help via chat here.

You can also email me at rajorgen at nmu dot com.