art libraries
journal
36 / 2 2011
Assessing and comparing
databases for art history
Svein Engelstad
W
orking in a large university library provides daily challenges in giving
appropriate advice to students and researchers when they search for art
history material. One of the biggest of these is how to choose the best databases to
use, and the survey described below aimed to provide better information on which
to base decisions about which the library should subscribe to. Many libraries face
the same problems. What is really covered in the different databases? And how do
they communicate with other library systems and electronic resources?
My work in a large university library means that
every day I find myself giving appropriate advice to
students and researchers who are searching for art
history material. I often envy the situation within
medicine: if an article or book is not cited in
Medline1 it is not worth reading. The situation
within the humanities is the complete opposite: we
have several hundreds of relevant databases for the
different fields of humanities.
Medicine is an international profession where all
researchers worldwide need to have access to the
latest research within their fields as soon as it is
published. The humanities usually have a narrower
perspective, and research in this domain is often
carried out on questions relevant to the enquirer’s
own country that are of limited public and
international interest. In the humanities there are
both highly specialised databases and also small
national databases within many fields. Even within
art history there are quite a number of different
databases, most of which appeared prior to any of
the printed bibliographies of the last years of the
20th century.
During the last year (2009-2010) I carried out
several assessments of the coverage of the various
different databases. Like most other institutions, the
University of Oslo Library has to spend its financial
resources carefully in order to be able to provide the
best tools – at the right price – for the university
community. Many of them are available on more
than one platform from different vendors, but the
basic content is the same. The different platforms
have differing interfaces, and also offer different
options for connecting to the online journals to
which the library already subscribes.
The purpose of my recent survey was to provide
better information as a basis for deciding which
databases our library should subscribe to. I am
convinced that many libraries are facing the same
problems: What is really covered in the different
databases? How do the databases communicate with
other library systems and electronic resources? I
hope that some of my observations may be of
interest to others working in art or humanities
libraries.
My assessment has been conducted by carrying
out searches on a number of internationally
acclaimed artists, architects, designers and art
historians, within different periods. I have also
included a number of Norwegian examples, in order
to compare the coverage in Norwegian databases
with that of the international ones.
The databases tested
Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).2 The BHA is
considered to be the best database for traditional
aspects of art history prior to the 21st century. It
includes literature from its predecessors Répertoire
d’art et d’archéologie (RAA) and the International
repertory of the literature of art (RILA). BHA covers
material published from 1973 onwards. The size of
the database was approximately 640,000 records in
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art libraries
journal
2010. I tested the BHA through the OCLC
interface, but it was also available via CSA.
However an alarming situation occurred in 2010: as
a result of financial problems the Getty Institute was
no longer able to support the BHA and its future
became uncertain. Attempts to transfer the BHA to
another institution proved futile. As of April 2010,
the Getty made BHA available free of charge from
its own website, rather than through a commercial
provider, and at the same time it stopped adding
new records to the database. The electronic
publisher ProQuest,3 in an attempt to fill the
vacuum that was left, launched the title
International Bibliography of Art (IBA). But users
should be concerned about several problems with
this solution. First of all, the old BHA content will
not be available from the new provider because of
copyright problems, apart from the last couple of
years it was published. Secondly, the editing of the
database has changed: IBA will not continue with
the previous system of national editors, and the
number of journals indexed has been reduced
dramatically.
ArtBibliographies Modern (ABM).4 ABM is the chief
source of information on modern and contemporary
art dating from the late 19th century and onwards,
including photography since its invention. It
includes abstracts of English and foreign-language
material about famous and lesser-known artists,
movements and trends. ABM’s coverage is wideranging and includes performance art and
installation works, video art, computer and
electronic art, body art, graffiti, artists’ books,
theatre arts, conservation, crafts, ceramic and glass
art, ethnic arts, graphic and museum design, fashion,
calligraphy, and also traditional media such as
illustration, painting, printmaking, sculpture and
drawing.
Art index5 Art Index is more complex than the
previous examples. It is provided in different
subsets: Art Index, Art Index Full text, Art Index
Retrospective, Art Abstracts and Art Museum
Image Gallery. Art Index indexes more widely than
the two titles above, and it also goes into adjacent
fields such as folklore, design fashion, museology
and non-western art. However it covers only about
20% of the journals indexed by BHA. Art Index
covers the period from 1984 to the present, while
Art Index Retrospective goes back to 1929. The size
of the database is more than 450,000 records. The
number of journals indexed is about 500.
Art & Architecture Complete (AAC)6 AAC is a
comprehensive bibliographic database that provides
complete indexing and abstracts for more than 730
academic journals and magazines, with full text for
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over 330 periodicals, and a collection of over 64,000
images. AAC covers the period from the 1980s to
the present, and the current size of the database is
about 945,000 records, including 255,000 entries in
full text.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals7 The Avery
Index database offers a comprehensive listing of
journal articles on architecture and design, including
bibliographic information on subjects such as the
history and practice of architecture, landscape
architecture, city planning, historic preservation,
and interior design and decoration. It covers more
than 700 journals on architecture and design from
the USA, Europe, Asia, Latin America and
Australia. Avery covers the period from 1930 to
present. The size of the database is about 640,000
records. I tested Avery on both OCLC and Ebsco.
RIBA Library, Drawings and Photographs8 is the
database of the library of the Royal Institute of
British Architects. The online catalogue9 indexes
articles from over 300 of the world’s most respected
architectural periodicals, and gives details of books
and audio visual materials acquired by the RIBA
Library, including information on books available
for loan to RIBA members.
DAAI: Design and Applied Arts Index10 is the leading
source of abstracts and bibliographic records for
articles, news items and reviews published in design
and applied arts periodicals from 1973 onwards.
DAAI covers both new designers and the
development of design and the applied arts since the
mid-19th century, surveying disciplines such as
ceramics, glass, jewellery, wood, metalsmithing,
graphic design, fashion, textiles, furniture, interior
design, architecture, animation, product design and
industrial design. The size of the database is about
210,000 records, with more than 1000 records added
each month.
JSTOR11 is an archive of over 1,000 leading
academic periodicals across the humanities, social
sciences and sciences, the majority of them academic
journals. Journals are always included from volume
1, issue 1 and include previous and related titles.
The most recently published issues, those of the
most recent three years, are not available. I have
tested the JSTOR packages 1-8. In the section of
Art and Art history there are 165 titles,12 the section
on architecture and architectural history 2613 These
collections are continually being expanded. As an
extra bonus JSTORprovides linkage to the
impressive image database ARTstor.14
Google Scholar (GS)15 claims to provide a simple
way to conduct broad searches for scholarly
literature. From a single place, one can search across
many disciplines and sources for articles, theses,
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36 / 2 2011
books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic
publishers, professional societies, online repositories,
universities and other web sites. It is impossible to
determine the size of the database; Google does not
give any description of its size other than that it is
enormous and multi-disciplinary.
Kunstbib16 is the Norwegian art history
bibliography. It consists of several sub-databases,
the oldest one indexing back to 1941. The main part
of the database consists of records from the 1990s to
the present. The size of the database is about 31,000
records.
Arkdok17 is the only Norwegian architectural
database, and is produced by the Norwegian
Association of Architects (NAL). It indexes
Norwegian architectural journals and books, as well
as international journals and monographs with
relevance to Norway. The size of the database is
about 28,000 records.
The results
Looking at the results of the different searches I
conducted, it is difficult to interpret them and to feel
confidence in them. The following examples are
searches on rather simple mainstream classical art
history questions:
Search term
fewer in the AAC and Art Index, while there are
392 hits in JSTOR. The editors have, for various
reasons, omitted the majority of the hits from
JSTOR, even though these are from relevant
journals that are included in the list of titles that
should be indexed. As we can see, this result repeats
itself in every single example, in more or less the
same ratio.
Looking at the last column, Google Scholar (GS)
reveals a big problem. GS returns more than three
times as many hits as JSTOR. GS does not index or
analyse the different sources themselves. It harvests
different sources, but which sources these are is
hard to figure out. Results from JSTOR appear
quite commonly in GS, but it is impossible to know
to what extent. Going back to Artemisia Gentileschi,
there are 188 hits in JSTOR from the Burlington
magazine. The same limitation in GS returns only 8
articles. The references in GS are taken from
publishers’ databases, from Google books, from
open access archives, from institutional archives and
many other sources. The results are presented in
rather random order, with the possibility of
restricting the search to ‘Social Sciences, Arts and
Humanities’ and limiting by year of publication. So
we cannot advise our students or researchers to use
GS instead of the traditional databases and archives,
although GS could be used in addition, because it
BHA
AAC
147
71
95
406
1340
Albrecht Dürer
1974
294
1927
1233
11,800
Leonardo da Vinci
2399
673
1180
3994
63,000
72
9
84
96
194
Jacob van Ruisdael
138
49
345
530
820
Pieter Brueg(h)el
671
153
618
1333
4600
Lodovico Carracci
83
8
145
226
301
Annibale Carracci
504
111
438
1625
2520
John Ruskin
397
265
328
1433
21,000
Donatello AND Sculpture
580
103
119
1940
6220
The last supper
368
169
416
1367
22,800
Chiaroscuro
225
148
302
3096
18,000
Pastel AND France
319
85
153
2337
22,200
Equestrian
828
221
630
3135
35,200
Tree of Jesse
127
11
74
364
1070
Artemisia Gentileschi
Jacopo Amigoni
The first three, BHA, AAC and A-I, are edited
indexes, while JSTOR is a full-text archive of
relevant journals. The first example shows 147 hits
for Artemisia Gentileschi in BHA and considerably
Art Index
JSTOR
Google
Scholar
includes some ‘grey material’ that is not available
elsewhere.
Looking at examples with more recent artists
from the 20th century reveals much the same trend:
39
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36 / 2 2011
Search term
BHA
ABM
AAC
Art Index
JSTOR
431
53
73
342
193
954
Hans Hartung
73
121
30
145
84
855
Vieira da Silva
75
94
25
127
143
4640
Frida Kahlo
199
394
240
143
320
6400
Diego Rivera
247
398
205
283
667
9970
Georgia O’Keeffe
359
525
313
594
949
4800
1085
1957
457
840
2958
20,000
Anselm Kiefer
277
669
182
283
290
1670
Max Beckmann
558
570
232
589
686
2380
33
63
25
52
29
352
Kazimir Malevich
Kandinsky
Tamara de Lempicka
A comparison between BHA and ABM shows
clearly that the latter has a stronger emphasis on the
art produced during the second part of the 20th
century, while the BHA focuses on earlier art
history. It is remarkable to note the relation between
ABM and Art Index. In a search for Kazimir
Malevich Art Index shows six times as many records
as ABM, but looking for Kandinsky reverses the
picture: in this case ABM returns more than twice as
many records as Art Index. The comments
regarding the records from GS are the same as those
in the previous paragraph.
Looking at examples for architecture and design is
also very interesting:
Google
Scholar
compared with 688 in Avery and 1046 in RIBA. The
same trend is evident for Le Corbusier, and here we
can also see that there are quite a number of relevant
articles in JSTOR as well.
For designers like Ettore Sottsass and Philippe
Starck it is remarkable how similar the numbers of
hits are in ABM, Art & Architecture Complete, Art
Index, Avery and the RIBA database. DAAI is
indisputably the best source of information for
designers.
For Norwegian architecture we find that the
international databases have fewer references than
we can find in the Norwegian architectural database,
Arkdok. Here we find 361 references for Snøhetta,
260 for Sverre Fehn, and 80 for Arne Korsmo.
ABM
AAC
Art
Index
Avery
RIBA
JSTOR
DAAI
GS
Arkdok
Alvar Aalto
221
284
426
688
1046
410
200
3420
–
Marcel Breuer
147
88
465
405
576
382
93
1910
–
Le Corbusier
823
779
1224
1886
2221
2903
396
23,100
–
Philippe Starck
267
246
159
283
251
15
713
1400
–
Ettore Sottsass
258
183
273
125
162
79
376
753
–
Snø(o)hetta
5
61
81
224
244
0
66
462
361
Sverre Fehn
7
57
85
175
186
9
25
220
260
Arne Korsmo
6
7
7
24
24
3
5
48
80
36
117
186
126
131
10123
–
68,400
–
Architecture AND
Islam
In most respects it seems that Avery and the
RIBA cover more or less the same amount of
information over the same time span. The RIBA
database even tends to have more hits than Avery,
which is remarkable since it is free. It is very clear
that ABM is not a relevant database for this topic.
Searching for Alvar Aalto reveals 221 hits in ABM,
40
Searching for Norwegian artists reveals that the
general international databases in art history do not
provide an adequate number of references.
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BHA
ABM
AAC
Art Index
Edvard Munch
662
633
235
743
839
5510
3936
Christian Krohg
27
36
5
12
27
255
95
Fritz(s) Thaulow
11
15
4
34
149
210
39
Gustav Vigeland
28
31
1
20
8
323
165
Bjarne Melgaard
–
–
4
–
1
–
39
The first four are artists from the 19th and 20th
centuries, the last is a contemporary Norwegian
artist living, working and exhibiting abroad. Even
Bjarne Melgaard seems to have a ‘world-wide’
reputation only in Norway.
Conclusion
This small survey elucidates some of the problems
inherent in using reference databases in our
subjects. First of all Google Scholar cannot be
considered relevant for students or researchers at
university level. Enormous amounts of information
can be found on Google Scholar, but very seldom
from reliable sources. One might on the other hand
find some relevant information from Open Source
archives that are not included in the databases.
One of the main problems is that these databases
are edited. This means that someone, with the best
of intentions, decides which articles from a certain
publication the database will include or exclude. An
editor with a different research specialism would
almost certainly have made other choices. Another
problem is that full-text searches are so often not
availabe. Entries in the database are restricted to
information about the author, the title of the article,
the journal title, a few keywords, in some cases also
an abstract, but rarely the full text. Even if the
article is available in full text it is not always
possible to search it from the database’s search
fields. A researcher in a specific field cannot be sure
that all the relevant material from a publication is
indexed in the database, even though the publication
in question is listed as included.
In art history research, as in many other
disciplines within the humanities, older research is
not outdated in the same way as in natural or life
sciences. A carefully-edited database can be very
valuable, if it has a long time span, but many of
these databases cover only the last 20 years of
research. This may be sufficient in some cases, but
in others it is necessary to look at the complete
research history of a topic. In these instances a
database like Periodicals Index Online17 is valuable,
JSTOR
(ArtHist)
GS
Kunst-bib
since it provides the complete tables of contents for
the periodicals that are included. It can also provide
links to full text journals. JSTOR too is very useful
in many cases, making it possible to search for
information in full text in all the journals it includes.
In the future I feel sure we will use full text
sources more than edited databases for the major
fields of art history. But in narrow, specialised fields
such as the art history of smaller countries like
Norway we will still need to rely on specialised,
smaller databases.
Since I finished my survey there has been
considerable concern about the future of art
bibliographies amongst art librarians and
researchers. The committee of artlibraries.net19
organised a conference in Lisbon at the end of
October 2010 to address this question. Amongst the
participants were Dr. Jan Simane, Chairman of the
IFLA Art Libraries Section, and representatives
from OCLC and the Getty Foundation. Some
models for future bibliographies were presented, but
the conference was not able to draw any conclusions
about the future. As I write, the survival of
traditional art bibliographies seems quite uncertain.
References
1. PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine,
National Institutes of Health,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.
2. BHA & RILA, Getty Research Institute,
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/bha/index.html.
3. International bibliography of art (IBA),
ProQuest, http://www.proquest.com/
en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/iba.shtml.
4. ARTbibliographies modern, ProQuest,
http://www.csa.com/factsheets/artbm-set-c.php.
5. Art full text, H.W. Wilson,
http://www.hwwilson.com/databases/artindex.
cfm#Index() .
6. Art & architecture complete, EBSCO
Publishing, http://www.ebscohost.com/public/
art-architecture-complete.
7. Avery index to architectural periodicals,
41
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journal
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
ProQuest, http://www.csa.com/factsheets/averyset-c.php.
Library drawings and photographs, RIBA,
http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawings
AndPhotographs/Home.aspx.
British Architectural Library Catalogue, RIBA,
http://riba.sirsidynix.net.uk/uhtbin/webcat.
DAAI: design and applied arts index, ProQuest,
http://www.csa.com/factsheets/daai-set-c.php.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/.
JSTOR art & art history journals,
http://www.jstor.org/action/showJournals#4369
3386.
JSTOR architecture & architectural history
journals, http://www.jstor.org/action/
showJournals#43693385.
ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml.
Google scholar, http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/
scholar/about.html.
Kunstbib: bibliography of Norwegian art,
Nasjonalbiblioteket, http://www.nb.no/baser/
kunstbib/english.html.
Bibliotek, NAL, Norske arkitekters
landsforbund,
http://www.arkitektur.no/?nid=5685.
Periodicals index online, ProQuest,
http://pio.chadwyck.co.uk.
artlibraries.net: virtual catalogue for art history,
http://www.artlibraries.net.
Svein Engelstad
Subject specialist in Art History
University of Oslo Library
P.O.Box 1009
Blindern
0315 Oslo
Norway
Email: s.a.engelstad@ub.uio.no
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