Research Resources

Libraries:

Beginning at Hunter, The Zabar Art Library has a strong collection of recent books in art history, as well as a number of catalogue raisonné and other ephemera. The library can also help with individual research and building bibliographies for further study. It happens to also be a quiet place to study with a gorgeous view downtown—the best at Hunter.

When a book cannot be found at Hunter, the CUNY Libraries Inter-Campus Services (CLICS) is an amazing resource, allowing students to request books from across the CUNY system. However, if a book is still not available through CLICS, the next step is to use the Interlibrary Loan system, which allows you to borrow a book from any library, if available. ILLs are incredible, allowing you to get books, scans, chapters, etc., but typically these requests take a week or two, so filling out requests early in the semester is key.

Alternatively, NYPL has some of the deepest holdings in any public library, and can be incredibly helpful when researching. The closest NYPL to Hunter is located at 67th and 2nd Avenue, and requests can be picked up here or at any branch. The Art and Architecture library at the Schwarzman can be very helpful for primary documents like exhibition catalogues and photographs. The same is true for Columbia’s Avery Library and NYU has put together a useful library guide for early researchers as well. Given our proximity, I highly recommend using the Frick Library, which has a similar interface to the CUNY system. Not much further, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likewise a gem.

Online databases:

First, don’t be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material available to you. Not everything can be read and, more to the point, not everything will be useful. Good research is predicated on knowing how to competently find and synthesise the most useful material, learning how to recognise what needs to be read closely and what can be glossed over. Treat research like a walk in the woods: blaze the parts of the trail you’d like to return to—as pdfs, as notes, and as citations—and move past those things that do not serve your purpose for now. You can always put them in a folder for future study—I’m still reading pdfs for the first time that I downloaded as an undegraduate.

Now to online research: The Hunter libraries’s onesearch is a federated search, meaning it combines all on-shelf resources will other digital sources, culled from various databases and online holdings. This means the results are often quite expansive. To winnow down results, I recommend changing some of the search parameters, either by selecting media-type (digital, print, in stacks, etc.), or sorting by year. A good rule of thumb is that, unless the work has caused a sea change in scholarship, anything published over twenty years ago is considered dated.

There are also useful individual databases through which to research. The very broadest is OCLC’s Worldcat, which catalogues nearly everything ever published. It is an amazing resource, though in an effort to be comprehensive there are often repeated entries, many of which have incomplete data. Don’t be surprised to find repeated entries. Still, it allows you to see the sheer volume of literature on a subject, and can be helpful for obscure topics. At the same time the search function is limited, so do not be surprised if you do not find what you are looking for: it likely exists on Worldcat but the search query isn’t bringing it up.

Here is a useful guide to some of Hunter’s other art-related databases. Perhaps best known to undergraduate students is JSTOR, which once housed journal articles but now contains a large number of books and archival material as well. A great database, but often journals do not make their most recent five years of material available, making it necessary to search out more recent articles in other places. Don’t just stop at JSTOR. Other useful databases include Proquest (especially for graduate theses and newspaper articles), Hathitrust (for full-pdf historical documents), and EBSCO (for art index and other journals).

Contemporary Journals:

Berkeley’s library has a very throughout list of art and art historical journals being published today. For a bit of orientation, The Burlington Magazine is the most venerable English-langauge journal in art history, founded in 1903, and I particularly recommend its Art History Reviewed series for a bit of historiography. In the U.S., the College Art Association (CAA) published The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, two major contemporary journals. The U.K. corollary is Art History, published by the Association of Art Historians (AAH). Other important journals include RES, Perspective, Oxford Art Journal, October, Third Space, Grey Room, Art Margins, Bomb, Modernism/Modernity, Gesta, and it goes on. A great first stop is The Art Bulletin, however, which features very well-written and traditional art historical essays, with impeccable visual analysis and proper citation. Let this be your guide and you cannot go wrong!

Museums:

Beyond libraries and databases, many museums also put up their older publications for free download. Met Publications, for instance, has many free pdf books, as does the Guggenheimand MoMA. These can be very useful for surveys, introductions to collections, and good quality images to source for papers.

Archive Resources

Though perhaps not useful for this course, for those interested in continued research in art history the archive is an important—and vexed—site of research. Learning how to gain access, use finding guides, and make appointments are keys to new research. Luckily, New York is full to the gills with archives, should you want to continue research beyond secondary literature and the museum. Two great first step towards finding archives are Archive Finder and Archivegrid. But those are just a start—there are truly so many archives. The Hunter Librarians are invaluable resources for students interested in finding and accessing libraries. They can help book appointments, provide letters of access, and otherwise facilitate research.

Writing Resources

There are peer and professional editors, as well as useful writing tips, at the Rockowitz Writing Center at Hunter.

The Chicago Manual of Style quick citation guide for footnotes and bibliography.