At the Click of a Button: The Art of Online Resources

Young Woman Blogging, After Marie-Denise Villers. Courtesy Mike Licht. https://flic.kr/p/5b2SHx. Creative Commons License (CC BY 2.0)

Though Watson Library may be best known for its collection of print manuscripts, monographs, catalogs, folios, and more, the library also collects both free and subscription electronic resources extensively. These databases, electronic books, and electronic periodicals—carefully acquired to suit our community’s art research needs and funded by the Lita Annenberg and Joseph H. Hazen Fund—are a rich source of information and an invaluable complement to our print collection.

Electronic resources are so important to our collection that we have a dedicated staff member to maintain them (i.e., me). As with many library functions, a great deal of work goes on behind the scenes in order to manage such a collection. Library staff evaluate potential new subscriptions or purchases, monitor database usage, liaise with vendors, resolve technical issues, and assess whether to renew subscriptions from year to year.

Library visitors can take advantage of this collection from within the library. There are a number of ways to access electronic resources in Watsonline onsite. If you would like to search for an electronic resource by title or browse an alphabetical list, click "E-Resources" at the bottom of the Watsonline homepage.

The homepage of Watsonline, with emphasis placed on the "E-Resource" button

From here, you can also view lists of electronic resources by subject. Note that there are subject headings for free resources, which you can access from any location, and for new resources, where you can find notable content acquired within the past year.

Browse an alphabetical list of electronic resources, search by database title, or browse by subject in Watsonline.

Alternatively, you can use the basic and advanced searches to retrieve databases by title or find direct links to individual electronic books and electronic periodicals from within those databases. You can also narrow the scope of a search to only electronic books and electronic resources, as shown here:

Narrow your scope to electronic books and journals when you conduct a search in Watsonline.

Over the course of the library’s closure, we have continued to provide subscription electronic content to Museum staff and researchers in their homes around the globe. Electronic resources have provided an important means to sustain research activity during a period of physical disconnect. As such, we temporarily expanded the scope of content offered by certain existing platforms and offered temporary access to at least sixteen new resources, which included MIT Press electronic books, Project MUSE, and the China Rare Books Reprinted Collection. As we reopen, we’re excited to again provide visitors onsite access to our electronic resource collection, and especially to those resources that we’ve recently acquired or reacquired during the closure.

One of these resources is A&AePortal, a collection of 238 electronic books in the areas of art, architecture, decorative arts, design, and photography compiled by Yale University Press. Titles include scholarly monographs, exhibition catalogs, collection catalogs, and catalogues raisonnés from academic and museum publishers which include Harvard Art Museums, Princeton University Press, and The Art Institute of Chicago. The platform provides digital access to The Image of the Black in Western Art, an eleven-volume series edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., based around Dominique de Menil’s archival project to document the construction of blackness in art over the past five thousand years.

A portion of the A&AePortal display, featuring a cover image and an image carousel. Screenshot by the author

We’ve also reinstated access to Critical Collective, an initiative of curator and critic Gayatri Sinha which collocates essays, critiques, interviews, encyclopedic references, and more that cover recent history and discourse in Indian visual arts. It pays particular attention to areas that may be neglected in scholarship, such as lens-based practices, video, and photography. It features entries on more than 150 Indian artists, each accompanied by images and essays that discuss that artist.

An artist-level display, featuring a biographical summary, images, and essays, from Critical Collective. Screenshot by the author

Watsonline is also a great way to find freely available websites of import to art historical research. As mentioned above, you can collocate and browse open access content by clicking Free Resources in the list of electronic resource subjects on Watsonline. A particularly valuable recent addition to this list is the African American Visual Artists Database, which provides information on an astounding seventeen thousand artists of the African Diaspora and Africa who have lived, worked, studied, or exhibited in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. Entries include bibliographies and exhibition histories, and occasionally additional information. Watson Library has worked with New York Art Resources Consortium to archive this database.

An artist-level display, featuring a bibliography and exhibition history, in the African American Visual Artists Database. Screenshot by the author

Independent Voices is another excellent free resource that we have added to our catalog. This digital collection of 19,675 issues of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals sheds light on various social movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, providing important context for its art historical developments.

A display of Rising Up Angry in Independent Voices. Screenshot by the author

As we welcome you back to the library, we hope to facilitate your research through both our physical and electronic collections. The electronic collection is always growing and changing to reflect the needs of its users, so don’t hesitate to share your input and suggestions with library staff or by emailing watson.library@metmuseum.org. Happy searching!