Art Information and the Internet: How to Find It, How to Use It

Citation

Cullen, R. (2001), "Art Information and the Internet: How to Find It, How to Use It", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 116-118. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.2.116.1

Art information is one of the fastest growing subject areas on the World Wide Web. Art sites have been developed to extend the outreach of museums and major galleries, to provide information for art and art history students, and to promote and sell a wide variety of art objects. The Web is uniquely suited to graphic representations of art, and the medium has become overloaded with a mass of material along with some extremely valuable information and collections of reproductions. This book is designed to provide a much‐needed map to sites of relevant and appropriate information, a guide to travellers as to which sites are worth their time and effort, advice on how to evaluate them, and an education to novice and experienced researchers into art research methods and skills.

The author, Lois Swan Jones, is well known to art students and researchers for her earlier works on Art Research Methods and Resources (Oryx, 1978; 2nd ed., 1984) and Art Information: Research Methods and Resources (Oryx, 1993). A new edition has been eagerly awaited. But this is not just a revision of the earlier works. While it is imbued with Jones’ well‐honed and expert research skills it does far more than just add a few Web sites, and ftp documents to previous bibliographies. Jones has completely rethought her approach to art research, and presents a fresh and up‐to‐date research manual that will be as essential a tool for the art scholar of the twenty‐first century and as her previous books have been in the last.

The book is organised into three parts. The first, “basic information formats” covers elementary information about the Internet, WWW, individual Web sites, URLs, search engines and other formats, such as catalogues, bibliographies, archives, microforms, CD‐ROMs, and audio‐visual formats.

Part II, which is more substantial, covers types of Web sites and how to find them, listing and describing the purpose and contents of Web sites of museums, academic institutions, cultural and professional organisations, libraries, serial indexes and auction houses and vendor galleries. Part III, which makes up more than half the book, focuses on how to use and supplement Web information. It covers basic research methodology, and then focuses on topics that students and scholars may have to deal with: periods of art, lives and works of individual artists (and collectors), other art forms such as architecture and photography, North American art studies, and non‐Western art. (The central focus of the volume is classical and European art, so these do not get individual sections.) A substantial index helps the user find needed information if neither of these two approaches work. Throughout the work, print and electronic sources are constantly intermingled and a new taxonomy of information resources starts to emerge that is a little different from that traditionally used in the field of art information resources. On the whole, it works, and users are guided into a new approach to the field of art information on the Internet and in traditional print and other formats.

The volume is a very welcome and essential vade mecum to art information in all formats available to the contemporary student or researcher, and no tertiary or large public library should be without it.