LibGuides: Museum Studies: Articles and Databases

Articles and Databases for Museum Studies

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Library of Congress Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.
Anthropology Online This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
A comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior. Features cross-searchable access to the acclaimed Ethnographic Video Online and Anthropology Online collections and provides anthropologists, sociologists and cultural historians with an expansive and multifaceted survey of the discipline. Researchers can explore a wide range of materials—from documentaries and field notes to written ethnographies and reference works.
Thematic areas include: family and race, material culture, language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, marriage, gender, and family roles.
Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window
late 19th century - present. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly. Brings together into one searchable resource Anthropological Literature from Harvard University and Anthropological Index from Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK. Provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. Offers coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals. A Source Titles List is available.
AnthroSource This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides indexing and full text access to peer-reviewed journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the world's largest organization of anthropologists. Also includes indexing for archived issues of all the Association's journals, newsletters and bulletins.
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
ArchiveGrid includes over four million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, it helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
Art and Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
1929 - present (full text varies by title). Unlimited users.
The collection includes over 600 full-text journals, 200 full-text books, and a collection of over 63,000 images. Provides the most up-to-date coverage of fine and decorative arts, commercial art, architecture, archaeology, design, and museum studies. An ideal tool for art historians, artists, designers, students, and general researchers.
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Comprised of over 2.5 million digital images of visual material encompassing artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures. Focuses on, but is not limited to, the arts. Includes architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture. Designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images as well as by art historians.
In order to take advantage of all the features of the site, you must register or log in with the service. The registration and login links are visible once you enter the database.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Bibliography of Native North Americans (BNNA) is a bibliographic database covering all aspects of native North American culture, history, and life. This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy. BNNA contains more than 80,000 citations for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. Dates of coverage for included content range from the sixteenth century to the present.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
Early Encounters in North America This link opens in a new window
1534 - 1850. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly (until completed). Contains early accounts of exploration, discovery, travel, environment, peoples, and cultures in North America. Currently contains 1,076 authors and approximately 83,000 pages of material. When complete the product will include more than 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico.
International Bibliography of Art (IBA) This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Indexes scholarly literature on Western art and is the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). The database includes records created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-09, with new records created by ProQuest using the same thesaurus and authority files.
The database will grow by 18,000 records per year, ensuring unbroken coverage of journals that were indexed in BHA and IBA prior to 2010. The initial data set created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-2009 covers scholarship up to 2009, including retrospective records for material published in previous years, and in some cases the new ProQuest indexing will also cover retrospective years in order to fill gaps in coverage.
Publications covered include at least 500 core journals, with an emphasis on specialist and rare titles that are not covered by other indexes, plus detailed coverage of monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
National Archaeological Database This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains approximately 240,000 reports on archeological investigation and planning, mostly of limited circulation. This "gray literature" represents a large portion of the primary information available on archeological sites in the U.S.
TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online) This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Provides descriptions of the rich archival, manuscript, and museum collections in repositories across the state which are available to the public. Consists of the collection descriptions or "finding aids" that archives, libraries, and museums create to assist users in locating information in their collections. Consider these an extended table of contents which describe unique materials only available at the individual repositories. In most cases, the collections themselves are NOT available online. A list of participating TARO repositories is available.