Guides: Subject Guide: Visual Arts and Culture: Subject Databases

Ask Us

You can get in touch through our live chat service or by email, and search our FAQs for answers to your questions.

Richard Pears

Dr Richard Pears

Email Me

Contact:

+44 (0)191 334 2975

A-Z resource listings

In addition to these subject-specific resources, you can also access the full A-Z listings for all library databases and e-journals

Resources

JSTOR
Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each title.

Proquest archive collections
African Diaspora, 1860-present; Black Drama Third Edition; Black Thought and Culture; ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century; Border and Migration Studies Online; Environmental Issues Online; LGBT Thought and Culture; LGBT Magazine Archive 1954-2015; Human Rights Studies Online; Anthropological Fieldwork Online; Social Work Online; British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries; North American Women's Letters and Diaries; Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820; Gerritsen Collection Women's History; Women's Magazine Archive 1846-2015; American Periodicals Series 1740-1940; British Periodicals Collection; C19: the 19th Century Index; Periodicals Archive Online Collections; Art & Architecture Archive 1895-2005; Country Life Archive 1897-2005; Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive; Early European Books Collections; Performance Design Archive Online; Music Online: Classical Scores Library; Music Online: Music Periodicals of the 19th Century; Royal Shakespeare Company Collection; Luther's Werke; Religious Magazine Archive 1845-2015; Twentieth Century Religious Thought; ProQuest Congressional Digital Collection 1789-2010; Colonial State Papers 1574-1757; Documents on British Policy Overseas 1898-1980; Trench Journals and Unit Magazines 1914-1919; Digital National Security Archive; Revolution and Protest Online; Security Issues Online; Jerusalem Post; Korea Times; Chinese Newspaper Collection 1832-1953; Leftist Newspapers 1845-2015; News Policy & Politics Magazine Archive; Selected US newspaper archives

Project MUSE
Searchable database that provides access to the full text of journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press and other university presses in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. Covers such fields as literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and others.
Web of Science
ISI Web of Science is an integrated platform designed to support research in academic, corporate, government, and not for profit organizations. ISI citation databases are multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information indexed to be searched by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. They can also be searched for articles that cite a known author or work. Cited reference searching allows use of a given work as if it were a subject term, to identify more recent articles on the same topic.
Scopus
A large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Scopus has journal coverage in many subjects across the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.

British Architecture Library
The RIBA Library catalogue includes architecture and art history journal articles as well as books and PhD theses.

Directory of open access journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all subjects and languages. There are now over 500 journals in the directory.

There is an extensive collection of library books for Visual Arts and Culture in the Bill Bryson Library, particularly in the oversize section on level 3, shelfmarks 700 to 779 and +700 to +779. The DVD and CD collection is located in the east wing of the library on level 3, after the Music section. All print and ebooks are listed in the library's Discover search engine.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years. The American Archive will ensure that this rich source for American political, social, and cultural history and creativity will be saved and made available once again to future generations.

BoB box of broadcasts
BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National is an innovative shared online off-air TV and radio recording service for UK higher and further education institutions. BoB enables all staff and students in subscribing institutions to choose and record any broadcast programme from 60+ TV and radio channels. The recorded programmes are then kept indefinitely (no expiry) and added to a growing media archive (currently at over 1 million programmes), with all content shared by users across all subscribing institutions. The user-friendly system allows staff and students to record and catch-up on missed programmes on and off-campus, schedule recordings in advance, edit programmes into clips, create playlists, embed clips into VLEs, share what they are watching with others, search a growing archive of material, plus more. Discover more about BoB National features by viewing our video tutorials.
Kanopy
Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video service for educational institutions that works directly with filmmakers and film distribution companies to offer thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases across diverse subjects and disciplines. Collections include titles from the DEFA Film Library, ArtMattan Films, HBO, Frameline, Ruscico, Pragda, BBC, Flicker Alley, National Film Board of Canada, First Run Features, Cinema Libre Studio, New Day Films, and the Criterion Collection/Janus Films.

EUScreen
EUscreen portal offers free online access to thousands of items of audiovisual heritage. It brings together clips that provide an insight into the social, cultural, political and economic events that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as chronicling important historical events, the EUscreen portal allows you to explore television programmes that focus on everyday experience. EUscreen is also intended to be a resource for educators, researchers and media professionals searching for new audiovisual content from across Europe.
La Cinémathèque Française: La Bibliotheque Du Film
Digitised collection of images, films and articles from the Cinémathèque Française Library.
MediaPlus
A cross-searchable collection of video, images and audio from a wide range of sources, including ITN and Reuters archives, news sources, Royal Geographical Society images, Getty images, and incorporating the Education Image Gallery, Film and Sound Online and NewsFilm.

Music online
Classical Scores Library will contain 400,000 pages of the most important classical scores, manuscripts and unpublished material, allowing for the study and analysis of more than 8,000 scores. Provides for textual searching by various criteria.
Naxos music library
The Naxos Music Library is an online collection of recorded music in streaming audio--primarily classical music, plus smaller collections of world music and jazz. Naxos contains 85,000 tracks from over 5,500 CDs from the Naxos Music and Marco Polo catalogs. Full liner notes are included for most recordings. Naxos also features world music anthologies from Arc and Celestial Harmonies labels, reissues of 20th-century premieres on the First Edition label, and selected classical recordings from the Analekta, Bis, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Haenssler labels. The Naxos Music Library includes most works from the standard concert repertoire, and contemporary and unusual repertoire as well. Two ongoing series, the American Classics Series and the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, demonstrate the range of music available online. Naxos also features Chinese music, both classical and folk.
Socialism on film
"This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba"--Publisher's website.

ArtStor
Artstor is a digital library of images covering the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. The collections comprise contributions from outstanding museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.
ArtUK

Bridgeman education
"[Searchable database of over] 300,000 [art] images from 2,000 sources, 8,000 locations and 30,000 artists. The site offers an excellent quality of image and metadata (captions and keywords) as well as the legal right to use the images within your institution. Search all media including photography, fine art, engravings, sculpture, architecture, archaeology & ethnography, history, science & medicine, decorative arts and artifacts."--About us.
The British Cartoon Archive
The British Cartoon Archive is located in Canterbury at the University of Kent's Templeman Library. It has a library, archive, gallery, and is a registered museum dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. It holds more than 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection of original artwork dates back to 1904 and includes work by W.K.Hasleden, Will Dyson, Strube, David Low,Vicky, Emmwood, Michael Cummings, Ralph Steadman, Mel Calman, Nicholas Garland, Chris Riddell, Carl Giles, Martin Rowson, and Steve Bell, amongst many others.

Oxford art online
The Grove Dictionary of Art contains 45,000 articles on every aspect of the visual arts painting, sculpture, graphic arts, architecture, decorative arts and photography from prehistory to the present day. Compiled over a period of 15 years, it represents the work of more than 6,800 scholars from around the world, each writing on his or her own specialist field of study. The online version provides access to the entire text of The Dictionary of Art (1996) with constant additions of new material and updates to the text, plus extensive image links. It offers original essays on each subject by scholars in the field, originally commissioned maps, diagrams, line drawings, art resources, site links (which include images), etc.

Uffizi Galleries
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) image collections
VADS provides a national collection of over 140,000 images from over 300 art and design collections across the UK, which are freely available for non-commercial use in education. The images cover the broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media. VADS is a service of the Library at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA).
Wellcome Images
Find thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects.

Adam Matthew Explorer
Digitised primary material including medieval, early modern and modern British sources, US collections, South Africa and India, missionary records and material for China and Japan.

Gale primary sources
Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) and our newspaper archives also accessed via Gale Newsvault.

Proquest archive collections
African Diaspora, 1860-present; Black Drama Third Edition; Black Thought and Culture; ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century; Border and Migration Studies Online; Environmental Issues Online; LGBT Thought and Culture; LGBT Magazine Archive 1954-2015; Human Rights Studies Online; Anthropological Fieldwork Online; Social Work Online; British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries; North American Women's Letters and Diaries; Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820; Gerritsen Collection Women's History; Women's Magazine Archive 1846-2015; American Periodicals Series 1740-1940; British Periodicals Collection; C19: the 19th Century Index; Periodicals Archive Online Collections; Art & Architecture Archive 1895-2005; Country Life Archive 1897-2005; Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive; Early European Books Collections; Performance Design Archive Online; Music Online: Classical Scores Library; Music Online: Music Periodicals of the 19th Century; Royal Shakespeare Company Collection; Luther's Werke; Religious Magazine Archive 1845-2015; Twentieth Century Religious Thought; ProQuest Congressional Digital Collection 1789-2010; Colonial State Papers 1574-1757; Documents on British Policy Overseas 1898-1980; Trench Journals and Unit Magazines 1914-1919; Digital National Security Archive; Revolution and Protest Online; Security Issues Online; Jerusalem Post; Korea Times; Chinese Newspaper Collection 1832-1953; Leftist Newspapers 1845-2015; News Policy & Politics Magazine Archive; Selected US newspaper archives
Wiley Digital Archives
Journal archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Royal College of Physicians and Royal Geographical Society

Subject Guide: Visual Arts and Culture: Subject Databases

Banner

Ask Us

Ask Us

Richard Pears

A-Z resource listings

Resources

Social media