Art

Hello, this is the library research guide for ART 593 with Professor Gillian Sneed, with information to help with your Formal Analysis Paper and your Methodological Analysis Paper. The content focuses on finding primary and secondary scholarly sources.

Additional resources:

• Finding high resolution digital images of artwork in Artstor on JSTOR
• Using interlibrary loan
  • If you find your item in OneSearch but it isn't available, log in to your library account and look for the request button.
  • If your item is not in OneSearch, log in to your library account, look for the ellipsis (...), and click the "ILL Request" link to get a blank request form.
• Accessing Special Collections for rare books and archival material
• Citing your sources with help from our How to Cite Your Sources guide and the tab on Chicago style.

Need help? Email Laurel Bliss at lbliss@sdsu.edu

Primary source documents are frequently collected in published books. To find these collections in our OneSearch system, follow these steps.

1. Brainstorm some keywords and phrases about your topic. If you were researching women's suffrage in America, for example, some good keywords and phrases might be "suffrage," "women," "feminis*," "nineteenth amendment," "vote*," or "activis*". (Note: the asterisk is used to truncate a word, so the system will search for all variations).

2. At the Advanced Search, pair your keyword with some of them common words found in subject headings for primary sources. These include:

* sources
* correspondence
* diaries
* speeches
* personal narratives
* documents
* interviews

3. If you want to impose any limits on your search, such as as location or language, choose them in the options box. Then click Submit.

4. Browse your results and click on titles which sound relevant or useful to your topic.

Scholarly books, exhibition catalogues, and peer-reviewed articles are the ultimate authoritative sources to use in a research assignment. They are written by experts in the field and have been vetted and fact-checked by other experts.

• Scholarly books are often published by university presses.
• Exhibition catalogues are a complementary part of an exhibition, and typically include essays by curators and images of the works on display. They will have a checklist of the works of art that include details such as the lending museum or collection, the name of the donor, date of creation, etc. Exhibition catalogues are published by the museum or gallery that hosted the exhibition, sometimes collaboratively with a university press.
• Peer-reviewed articles are published in academic journals (not magazines or newspapers) and found in article databases that let you limit your results to only peer-reviewed materials. In art history, two of the main article databases are Art Full Text and ArtBibliographies Modern.