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Relevant Search Terms/Keywords
Examples:
- Elements of Art: Composition, line, shape, color, light and shadow, form, and texture
- Medium: Oil paint, wood, marble, fresco, engraving, tempera, bronze, gouache, and acrylic
- 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."