ARHS 4843: Medieval Art

Use this guide to find pertinent sources at the University of Arkansas Libraries and elsewhere for Dr. Jacobs's ARHS 4843 class/Fall 2012.

How Do I Get This Citation?

If you discover pertinent citations to journal articles in your online searches, use Find it!, OneSearch, or Fetch Item to track down your resources.

If we don't own or subscribe to the material online, you can obtain rapidly many articles and chapters via the Libraries' ILL software, ILLiad.

Note on Controlled Vocabulary

Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in databases. In many cases using keywords works well. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by the specialized terms of the database, also known as "controlled vocabulary," and often referred to as "descriptors." The order in which you enter your terms can matter as well. For example, often you can best search by author by typing the last name before the first name.

Introduction to Book Chapters

Not all books contain a unified narrative from the beginning to the end of the text. Some are collections of essays, with each chapter having a unique title and author(s). These works share features with both books and journals. Like a book—unlike a journal—there is more lag time before publication. However, like a journal—unlike a book—catalogs do not trace the titles and authors of every chapter and researchers must use databases and indexes to search for chapters by a particular author or on a specific subject. If you have difficulty attempting to track down an essay or a chapter in a book, I am happy to help.

Introduction to Journal Articles

Although books are the dominant form of scholarship in the humanities, articles are valuable, especially those appearing in scholarly journals.

Some assignments require one to limit one's search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles. "Peer-reviewed," "scholarly," "academic,"and "refereed" are often used interchangeably to describe manuscripts that underwent expert review before publication.

Some databases allow one you to limit your search to scholarly journals.

Specialized Databases

Strategy for Art & Architecture Source

Suppose you wanted for find scholarly articles on medieval iconography. The following is one strategy to searching in Art Full Text. There are other strategies. Use these steps:

  • Open Art & Architecture Source
  • Click on the hyptertext link for the database and authenticate if required.
  • Look for the search box.
  • Enter MEDIEVAL ICONOGRAPHY as a subject search (i.e., type terms in first box on the left and pull down the menu Select a Field and change to SU Subject).
  • Click on Search.

You may work with these results or narrow them by adding additional terms. For example, in the second box you could type (france or french) to add this concept.

Keep in mind you can use a variety of search terms.