ART & ARCHITECTURE: Find Books

Offers over 15,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts

​The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes includes offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in its collections. 

Try the archive's site OpenLibrary for an interface to the published books on archive.org and links to other online book collections.

The Getty Research Portal is an online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts in the public domain. Through this multilingual, multicultural union catalog, scholars can search and download complete digital copies of publications (including rare books, foundational literatures, and periodicals) for the study of art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.

Try a keyword search. Once you find a book that is relevant to your topic, use the subject headings of that book to help you find "more like this".

Keyword search:

• contemporary america* art   Note: use the truncation symbol * as a technique to broaden your search to include various word endings and spellings
• islamic calligraphy
• architect* renaissance italian

Subject headings:

• Painting, Italian
• City planning--History
• Women Photographers

Not finding enough, or an item checked out? Try borrowing from elsewhere.

To find exhibition catalogs held by the Wellesley College Library, perform a keyword search that includes exhibition* (the truncation symbol * will search for both the descriptive word 'exhibition' and the subject word 'exhibitions').

Examples:             

    rothko exhibition*
    bauhaus exhibition* 
    exhibition* africa* museum fine arts boston
 

Almost every bibliographic record for an exhibition catalog includes the subject word Exhibitions.

Examples:
    Rothko, Mark, 1903-1970 -- Exhibitions
    Bauhaus -- Exhibitions
    Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) -- Exhibitions
    Prints -- 20th century -- Exhibitions

The book/catalog vendor Worldwide Books : Exhibition Catalogues and Art Books has a searchable website for exhibition catalogs. This can be a helpful place to search for obscure exhibition catalogs (although most of them should be catalogued in WorldCat). The Getty Research Library's catalog is another helpful resource as well.

Can't find what you're looking for at Wellesley?

Use WorldCat Discovery to search and request directly from libraries worldwide via Interlibrary Loan.

Questions? Interlibrary Loan Guide