North Seattle Community College North Seattle Community College
Library & Media Services

Research Guide for Art History 252: Renaissance Artists

Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Prepared by Elinor Appel, NSCC Librarian
IRIS tutorial - learn how to do effective college research

Links:

Today you will practice evaluating websites.

  1. Source to practice analyzing together
  2. Left side of the room's source
  3. Right side of the room's source
  4. Additional links - which are more authoritative?

Image source: Black Africans in Renaissance Europe [D 233.2 B44 E26]

Books

Reference Books - use these books for background information and to look up specific topics. Some examples:

  • 30,000 Year of Art [Ref N 5300 .T485 2007] - presents artwork chronologically from different countries/continents by era or by year
  • Encyclopedia of World Art, 15 vols. [Ref N31 .E53]
  • Turner's Dictionary of Art, 34 vols. [Ref N31 .D5 1996]
  • Stokstadt's Art History [Ref N5300 S923 2005]

Circulating Books - use these books to find more in-depth information on your topic.

Refer to Finding Books for tips on searching the catalog using keywords and subject headings. Begin with a keyword relevance search.

Find a book that relates to your topic, then click on the subject headings of a book record to find more books on your topic.

Once you find a title or two in the catalog, locate them in the circulating collection upstairs and then browse the shelves in that area for more books on your topic.  

You may also need to request items to be sent to the library at North from libraries at South and Central. Ask us for help if you don't know how to do this. Some examples of books at North:

  • Dürer to Veronese: Sixteenth-Century Paintings in the National Gallery [ND170.D86 1999]
  • Early Flemish Painting [ND 665 .F74 1997]
  • Fra Angelico [ND623.F5B4513 2007]
  • Great Women Masters of Art [ND 38 .V54 2002]
  • Renaissance Self Portraiture [N7619.5.I8W66 1998]
  • El Greco of Toledo [ND 813 .T4 A4 1982]

Articles

Refer to Finding Articles for tips on how to search a periodical database using keywords and topics. Remember to "talk to the database" using Boolean logic or other search symbols. The Advanced Search in article databases includes the Boolean operators (AND, etc.) for you.

  • and – for combining concepts/keywords, will narrow the search: mannerism and tintoretto
  • “ ” – when you are using a phrase: "giovanni bellini " [note: this is rarely necessary in Advanced Search]
  • * – when the terms have related stems: manneris* for mannerism, mannerist

Good periodical databases for your research are:

  • Academic Search Complete - general database with articles ranging from news to scholarly
  • ProQuest Direct - another general database containing a range of periodicals
  • JSTOR - older articles from academic journals

Web sites

Refer to Searching the Internet for tips on searching the Internet effectively using Google. Once you find a likely website, check it against my Web evaluation guide. Does it pass the test? Some examples:

General

Annotated Bibliographies

An annotated bibliography involves citing your sources correctly and annotating, or writing an evaluative description, of these sources. Your instsructor will let you know her minimum requirements for an annotation.. See the assignment sheet for more information.

You will be using the Chicago citation style format for this assignment.

Use this style guide to create your citations: Chicago Style Guide (PDF) Or ask a librarian to show you how to use Noodlebib, a citation generator that allows you to format and save your citations and annotations online.