LibGuides: Art & Design: Reference sources

What are reference sources?

Reference sources are resources used to locate basic information and secondary literature.

There are many types of reference sources, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, handbooks, guides, and style manuals.

They are a fantastic places to begin your research, especially if you are exploring a new topic.

Reference sources can help you to:

define your topic in general terms
find background information, including themes and key points
identify keywords and alternative terms for conceptualising your subject, and for database searching.

Reference sources

The selected online resources below offer images, videos, and writings about art and design aimed at learning, teaching and research. Please have a look at dictionaries, handbooks and encyclopedias tabs for more reference resources.

Academic Video Online - Art & Architecture
Academic Video Online is a comprehensive video subscription delivering over 70,000 titles. It is curated for the educational experience and includes a variety of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, feature films, performances, news programs and newsreels, and demonstrations.
Film Platform
Film Platform is designed to serve as a bridge between the film world and academia. The collection is curated by film experts and leading academics to showcase meaningful documentaries of social, political and cultural importance by some of the world’s top international filmmakers.
JSTOR
JSTOR is a full-text archive of academic journals along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for study and research. To find images within JSTOR, select Advanced Search, then search by artist's name in the ‘caption’ field. This will retrieve all articles with images captioned with the artist’s name.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online is the access point for the Grove Dictionary of Art and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. In addition, users can access the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and the Oxford Companion to Western Art.