Art & the History of Art Research Guide

These are links to sites where you can find e-books and other digital content in art, architecture, and media.*

• JSTOR and Project MUSE have incorporated many additional e-books made available from publishers during the COVID closures.

Selection of online portals to e-publications in art:

• British Museum Publications
  Museum research catalogues, publications, and journals written by staff and external experts.
• Canadian Online Art Book Project
  Founded in 2013, the Canadian Online Art Book Project is a growing digital library of books–all original works commissioned by the Art Canada Institute–by the country’s leading art experts on artists who have made a critical contribution to the evolution of the nation’s art history.
• Getty Publications Virtual Library
  More than 300 Getty publications to download and read for free.
• Getty Research Portal
  A free online search platform providing worldwide access to an extensive collection of digitized art history texts from a range of institutions. This multilingual and multicultural union catalog affords art historians and other researchers the ability to search and download complete digital copies of publications devoted to art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.
• Guggenheim Museum Publications
  Guggenheim Museum publications provided by the Internet Archive.
• Heritage Preservation (World Monuments Fund)
  Extensive publications on heritage preservation issues.
• Internet Archive Open Library
  A free digital library with over 45,000 art titles.
• Latsis Foundation E-Library
  Publications of cultural, artistic and historical interest to researchers in Greek art and archaeology.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications
  MetPublications is a portal to The Met’s comprehensive publishing program with over 1,500 titles, including books, online publications, and Bulletins and Journals from the last five decades.
• MoMA Exhibitions
  Exhibitions from MoMA’s founding in 1929 to the present.
• National Gallery of Art Publications
  The National Gallery of Art’s publishing program balances an allegiance to the art and craft of the printed book with a commitment to the utility and accessibility of digital and online formats.
• Smithsonian Books Online
  The Smithsonian Libraries’ online books.
• Video Art & Artists Essays
  PDFs of essays commissioned by the Video Data Bank on the subject of video art and artists, as well as a range of essays about individual artists’ work.

*Find a broader list of library e-book pathways and tips for finding e-books in the library collections in the Do Research Remotely guide.

Use the main search box, Discover, on the Library homepage to search for books at Amherst and across the Five Colleges. You can filter your results by format (book, ebook, etc.) or filter by library location.

Use the Place Request button to have material delivered to Frost for pickup.

• Have a call number? Use our guide to Find it in Frost.
• Don't know what a call number is? See our guide on Using Call Numbers.
• Looking for a book not held in the Five Colleges? Use our Request Service.

Search Tips

• Include specific names of materials in your searches. 

• Search for specific art movements to learn more about the materials and processes used by artists aligned with that movement

• Search for specific artists who use/d a material or employed a process that you're interested in learning more about.

A note on searching for exhibition catalogs:
Almost all Five College Library catalog records for exhibition catalogs contain the word "exhibitions," either as a subject term, or in the description. To find a catalog focused on a specific artist or topic, perform a keyword search that includes the artist's name (last name is often enough) or the topic word(s), and the word exhibition* (using the truncation symbol * searches for both the word exhibition and the subject term exhibitions).