Where to Search for Books
Method | What's there | Why use it |
IUCAT | Books, journals, maps, etc. already at IU (both physical copies and e-resources) | Covers most topics, materials often immediately available |
Worldcat | Books, journals, maps, etc. that may or may not be at IU | Covers all topics, can find material regardless whether IU happens to own it |
Interlibrary Loan | Use this service to order materials that are unavailable at IU (either because IU doesn't own it or it is checked out) | Use alongside Worldcat or when you don't find a book, journal, etc. in IUCAT |
Google Books | Books and journals that Google has scanned from many Library collections. Many items are available only in preview or snippet view. | Ideal for journals and books in the public domain (usually published before 1923). Preview can help locate particularly useful sections. |
Hathitrust | Scanned books and journals, often the same materials as Google Books | Navigation is often more cumbersome than Google Books, but locating specific journal issues is often easier |
What Expert Researchers Know
Type of Book | How to Use These Books |
Exhibition Catalogues |
These titles document museum and gallery shows; are often the best source for high-quality images; and usually include artist biographies, curatorial essays, artist interviews and/or writings, and career chronologies. Use the term "Exhibitions" as part of your keyword or subject search in IUCAT. To find contemporary artists featured in group exhibitions, search the Contemporary Artists Index, from the Cleveland Institute of Art. |
Monographs | These are books by or about artists published independent of any exhibition. Usually, these are in-depth writings that analyze or provide context for an artist and his/her work. Look for words like "Criticism and Interpretation" in the subject heading of a book. Search in IUCAT using "criticism" or "analysis" as keywords. |
Here are the top eight recommended article databases for apparel merchandising research. For further options, look at the Specialized Databases page. Articles may be published by scholarly journals, magazines, or newspapers. In addition to news and criticism, you can find trend reports and designer interviews in these databases.
Art research database covering fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as areas of architecture and architectural design.
Features full-text articles as well as detailed indexing and abstracts for an array of journals, books, podcasts and more. Also includes periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch. Designed for use by art scholars, artists, designers, students and general researchers. Supersedes Art Full Text and includes all the material available from that database.
International index to design and craft journals; contains references to 500+ journals published since 1973 and data on over 50,000 designers, craftspeople, studios, workshops, etc.
DAAI, an international index to design and craft journals, contains references from more than 500 design and craft journals published since 1973 as well as data on over 50,000 designers, craftspeople, studios, workshops, firms etc. Coverage includes all areas of design and crafts. DAAI contains four supplementary databases: an education directory of universities and colleges which offer courses in design and craft subjects; an organizations directory of design and craft organizations, societies, associations, and centers; an archives directory of design and craft archives and special collections; and a periodicals directory of design and craft journals.
Allows users to search across ProQuest databases with an emphasis on the arts.
Regional, national and international business, financial, banking and industry publications.
Provides access to peer-reviewed business journals, covering all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, banking, finance, and more. Indexing and abstracts and full text are available back as far as 1886.
Integrates business and financial information from data providers throughout the world.
Includes information on more than 170 million businesses, both public and private, around the world; including the UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and emerging markets.
Please note: Euromonitor allows access to IU faculty, staff, and students only. Authorized users may utilize the information obtained from this resource for academic, non-commercial purposes only, and only during the time of official affiliation with IU. Passport is a global market research database encompassing historical and forecasted statistics, reports & interactive tools on industries, economies and consumers in 210 different countries and territories. Passport also tracks the effects of COVID-19 for 50 different countries
Allows users to search across six ProQuest business databases: ABI/INFORM Complete, EconLit, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: Business, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, and The Women's Wear Daily Archive.
Scholarly journals, including those that publish peer-reviewed articles, are a major source of scholarly communication about art and art history.
Use the checkbox in these databases to limit your search results to only scholarly articles or peer-reviewed articles.
Art research database covering fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as areas of architecture and architectural design.
Features full-text articles as well as detailed indexing and abstracts for an array of journals, books, podcasts and more. Also includes periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch. Designed for use by art scholars, artists, designers, students and general researchers. Supersedes Art Full Text and includes all the material available from that database.
Allows users to search across ProQuest databases with an emphasis on the arts.
International index to design and craft journals; contains references to 500+ journals published since 1973 and data on over 50,000 designers, craftspeople, studios, workshops, etc.
DAAI, an international index to design and craft journals, contains references from more than 500 design and craft journals published since 1973 as well as data on over 50,000 designers, craftspeople, studios, workshops, firms etc. Coverage includes all areas of design and crafts. DAAI contains four supplementary databases: an education directory of universities and colleges which offer courses in design and craft subjects; an organizations directory of design and craft organizations, societies, associations, and centers; an archives directory of design and craft archives and special collections; and a periodicals directory of design and craft journals.
Primary Sources provide direct or first-hand evidence about an event, object, person or work of art. Primary sources:
Use the databases below to search for primary sources.
The most popular women's periodical of its day, with stories, poems, fashion, illustrations and music.
Godey's Lady's Book was intended to entertain, inform and educate the women of America. In addition to fashion descriptions and plates, the early issues included biographical sketches, articles about mineralogy, handcrafts, female costume, the dance, equestrienne procedures, health and hygiene, recipes and remedies and the like. Each issue also contained two pages of sheet music, written essentially for the piano forte. Gradually the periodical matured into an important literary magazine containing extensive book reviews and works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and many other celebrated 19th century authors who regularly furnished the magazine with essays, poetry and short stories. Also includes hand-colored fashion plates, mezzotints, engravings, woodcuts and, chromolithographs.
The databases below provide a wide variety of image of visual artworks. Printed books are often the best source of images, when looking for a specific artwork; use IUCAT to look for books about the artist or artistic movement. Find directions for citing images in the Image Citation: Formats and Best Practices guide.
PLEASE NOTE: the Artstor platform is being retired and will no longer be available as of August 1, 2024. Content has already migrated to Artstor on JSTOR. Existing individual Artstor user accounts will carry over to the new JSTOR platform. A digital image library of over 2.5 million digital images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. To save or download images, users must register for an individual account.
Users who create an account also gain access to a set of tools for sharing images, curating groups of images, downloading them directly into PowerPoint presentations, and comparing and contrasting images.
Over 14,000 Kodachrome slides by amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman (1896-1972) about his travels in the United States and abroad.
Taken by amateur photographer Charles Weever Cushman between 1938 and 1969, the images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The collection is part of the Indiana University Archives. The richly saturated Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white, "a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray," writes Eric Sandweiss, IU Carmony Chair and Professor of History, in an essay included on the collection's Web site. "In Cushman's work," he observes, "the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present."
Resource containing more than 775,000 high-quality runway, backstage, and street style images. Curated by Editor-in-Chief Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT in New York.
The archive includes: international runway shows from the 1970s until the early 2000s, from over 400 designers, collections from McQueen, Gaultier, Westwood, Chalayan, Galliano, and more. Also includes backstage and front row shots from fashion shows of the past forty years and street-style images from global fashion cities.
Image Collections Online showcases image collections curated by libraries, archives, and other cultural-heritage institutions of Indiana University.
Image Collections Online (ICO) includes a variety of historical photographs and images of cultural objects from the Lilly Library, the IU Archives, the Archives of African American Music and Culture, the Liberian Collections, the IU Map Collections, and others. Collection managers interested in submitting their collections for inclusion in ICO should contact the IU Libraries' Digital Collections Services department.
Encyclopedia articles about artists, architects, and artistic movements & periods, as well as bibliographies for further research. Also includes thousands of searchable images.
Provides access to Oxford’s art reference works, including the Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Oxford Companion to Western Art.
The Sage Collection is maintained by the School of Art, Architecture + Design and includes clothing, accessories, and related items from the past and present. The Sage Collection’s namesake, Elizabeth Sage, arrived at Indiana University in 1913 as the first professor of clothing and textiles. During her teaching career at IU, Ms. Sage accumulated clothing and textile samples for use in her classroom, and then donated those teaching materials to the department upon her retirement in 1937.
Textile Hive provides digital access to the Andrea Aranow Textile Design Collection, comprised of over 40,000 textiles spanning fifty countries. Users need to create an individual login to access.
The following databases provide streaming films.
500 hours of documentaries and interviews illustrating the theory and practice of a variety of art forms and providing the context necessary for critical analysis.
Covers Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Modern, and Contemporary art. Also includes video on applied topics such as architectural and graphic design.
The criterion collection is a series of important classic and contemporary films with high technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.
Provides access to documentary and social issues streaming films.
Includes content from such production companies as Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films, Good Docs, Kartemquin Films, MediaStorm, the National Film Board of Canada, Scorpion TV Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films and KimStim. Includes access to the Docuseek2 Complete Collection 2nd Edition, the Docuseek2 Complete Collection 3rd Edition, and the Icarus Films Collection.
This collection brings together over 1,200 hours of videos that retrace the history of fashion, clothing, and costume worldwide.
Covers both the behind-the-scenes work and the end garments that appeared in stores and on runways in Milan, Paris, London, and New York. Includes videos from the series Designer DNA, Elements of Style, Fashion Classics, Millennium Fashion, Model TV, and VideoFashion News.
Provides award-winning documentaries with relevance across the curriculum, presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.
Filmakers Library Online provides access to more than 1,500 online streaming titles from the award-winning distributor Filmakers Library. New releases will be added as made available.
Streaming educational video. Covers a wide range of curricular subjects, including history, biology, business and economics, engineering, computer science, technical and trade skills, art and architecture, music and dance, philosophy and religion, geography, environmental science, anthropology, language and literature, mathematics, psychology, sociology, political science, and more.
Includes titles produced by A&E, PBS, BBC Learning, National Geographic, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, HBO Documentary Films, PBS NewsHour, Open University, Bill Moyers, California Newsreel, Annenberg Learner, TED, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, and more.
This collection assembles hundreds of documentary films and series from the history of the Public Broadcasting Service into one online interface.
In general, start your search in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. If you are looking for an IU dissertation and cannot find it in ProQuest, search IUCAT. If it is not in IUCAT, search WorldCat.
For search tips, visit the IU Libraries' guide to Finding Dissertations & Theses.
Comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, including millions of works from thousands of universities. Each dissertation published since July, 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. Simple bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637.
Includes the following:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: UK & Ireland
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: A & I
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: CIC Institutions
Free database providing access to records for more than 1.2 million electronic theses and dissertations from around the world.
Includes content from American Doctoral Dissertations, a comprehensive record of dissertations accepted by American universities, the print index Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities. Searched by author, title, subject and university.
Looking for examples of IU MFA theses, including accompanying images? Email archives@indiana.edu with your request.