A resource for undergraduate students at the University at Albany who are unfamiliar with art history and those who are majoring or minoring in art history
Art Periods/Movements: Prehistoric art, ancient art, Renaissance, Medieval, modern art, and Neoclassism
Other terms: subject matter, perspective, symbolism, iconography, symbolism, scale, style, and tone
Search Tips
Boolean Operators
AND, OR, and NOT between keywords
AND: Narrow your search (Ex: Michelangelo AND drawings)
OR: Broaden your search (Ex: Size OR scale)
NOT: Excludes specific keywords from your search (Shadow NOT darkness)
Phrase Searching
Helpful in refining search by enclosing the phrase in quotation marks
Ensures results will include the exact phrase
Ex: "Oil painting"
Proximity Searching
Allows you to find documents where two or more terms appear near each other within a certain distance from one another.
Depends on the search engine
JSTOR: Uses the tilde (~) symbol followed by a number to define the proximity in basic search and NEAR operator in advanced search (Ex: Color theory ~ 5)
Art Abstracts (H.W. Wilson) Hosted by EBSCO: Uses the Near(N) and Within (W) operator.
Near Operator (N5): Finds words within a maximum of five words apart from each other
Within Operator (W8) : Finds words that appear within eight words of each another.
Wildcards
Used to search for all possible endings of a root word by using special characters (question marks and asterisk)
Ex: Wom?n with a question mark between the M and N will find works with the keywords "woman" and "women."
Ex: Librar* with a asterisk at the end will find words that contain the words "libraries," "library," and "librarian."