| Judith Downie
Humanities Librarian
CSUSM Library
KEL 3424 Office Hours: by appointment or if my
door is open.
jdownie@csusm.edu
(760) 750-4374 |
|
The purpose of this guide is to familiarize you with the
resources you need for research on
in visual arts.
This page is to help you
get started on your
annotated bibliography (due February 16) and five-to-seven
page research paper (due March 9) that require research.
Getting Started
From
Professor Chance's
site:
"Through an examination of the topic passion with reference
to historical, social, philosophical, psychological,
cultural and contemporary perspectives, students will
situate themselves and their artwork in the larger cultural
conversation of our time."
Your first writing assignment
is a topic of passion (something that is meaningful to you)
and is the jumping-off point for your research for both the
annotated bibliography and research paper. This means you
need to locate materials that inform you on aspects of cultural
conversation over a period of time on your topic. You need
to locate a minimum of
five sources to annotate for the
bibliography and incorporate in your paper.
Places to start:
- An encyclopedia or dictionary
of art or visual art that discusses various aspects to help you
find one that interests you. An example is A Visual
Dictionary of Art in the CSUSM book stacks.
- Another jumping-off point is to start is with your passion. Is it
social (borderlands, world hunger, domestic abuse) or is it medical
(AIDS, eating disorders) or is it political (disenfranchisement,
political corruption) or is it moral (pornography, religious
conservatism/liberalism)? And the list goes on...
These topics can all be researched in our
catalog or research databases...so let's explore.
Books
Any well researched project uses books to support your
thinking and writing. To locate them, either do
KEYWORD searches using terms from your class readings and
notes, TITLE searches for
specific works, or search for AUTHORS who have been identified as
authorities on the topic.
Finding Books:
Using Keyword
Searching
The easiest way to start to find material is by
typing a few important words that identify your topic
into the search box and examining the results to develop
more focused language. For this class, You might start
with the term "visual arts". Be sure to use the double
quote marks to get more appropriate results. If the
computer is directed to search for visual arts, the search will return
with very different results as it looks for visual AND
arts in any order and anywhere in the item's record.
This results in many hits that won't be useful to you as
they will be off-topic or vague.
Tip: Remember computers are stupid, the search engine
rarely is capable of looking for anything more than
exactly what you typed in. Using the * (asterick) tells
the computer that you want variations of a term. The
example of typing art* will return art, arts, artists,
and artistic. You have no guarantee that
the author of a great resource is going to use the same
words as you do, so this broadens the search to capture
more than the search would return if you just asked for
'art'. Sometimes you will get back much more than you
bargained for, especially with shorter root terms like
art*. You may need to add the term visual or a
topic term, such as 'psychology' or 'women' (or whatever
your focus term is) to help reduce the hit total.
Finding Books: Useful Subject Terms
Once you
have found some useful titles, look at the lower part of the
book record for the subject links as shown in the screenshot
below. Library catalogs
use specific subject headings to group related books
together. Here are some examples:
Journal Articles
Journals include some of the latest research in the
field. They're a good source for finding very detailed
information on your topic. Some databases do not offer
full text of the articles. Use the
 button
to check our other resources for full text.
Art Abstracts
Includes abstracts from periodicals, yearbooks, museum
bulletins, competition and award notices, exhibition
listings, interviews, film reviews, and more. Use the
button.
Academic
Search Premier (via Ebscohost)
Full-text. A large, multi-disciplinary database
offering full text for nearly 1,850 scholarly journals,
including more than 1,250 peer-reviewed titles.
CQ
Researcher
Full-text. Explores a single "hot" issue in the news in-depth each
week. Topics range from social and teen issues to
environment, health, education and science and technology.
Lexis Nexis Academic
Provides access to a wide range of news, business, legal,
and reference information. Here is a page on tips for
Lexis Nexis searching.
Project Muse
Full-text coverage for hundreds of scholarly journals in the
humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.
Subject-specific databases that can be useful
Womens Studies International
Includes over 204,000 records drawn from a variety of
essential women's studies databases.
HAPI: Hispanic American Periodicals Index
Indexes journals from 1970 on providing information about
Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean and
Hispanics in the United States.
Internet Sites
(in addition to Professor Chance's page)
The following are a few Internet sites that are related to
the visual arts. Please surf the Web responsibly--that means
evaluating the sites and information found for relevance, authority, and
scholarly content.
Citing Your Sources
As you write your paper, you'll need to cite passages and
ideas from the sources you've found. In order to cite
your resources properly, you need to follow the style
guide used by for this class, the Modern
Language Association's Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers.
Need More?
Judith Downie,
Humanities Librarian
(760) 750-4374 OR come by my office (KEL
3424), I am available if my door is open (most of the
time) OR make an appointment by phone or
email.
CSUSM Writing Center
The staff of the
writing center
are there to help you.
|
,
175K) provides examples of the most-cited
source forms