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The Burlington Magazine has produced their own index with content up to December, 1997.  The editor of the Index, Barbara Pezzini, asked me to post this discussion she provided for me on the advantages of using their index as opposed to Jstor.    

To use the index, go to http://index.burlington.org.uk/  and register and a password will be emailed to you.

It works better with Firefox and Safari but latest versions of Internet Explorer should be supported too.

Questions should be directed to Barbara

 

 

Lee Sorensen

Duke University Libraries

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Illustrations

1) In the Burlington Index you can search for illustrations. Those have been indexed and are vocabulary controlled  - in Jstor you free-text search for captions, but in many captions the name of the artist is not included (especially in issues up to the 1970s); and when the artist is included names are often cited with various and inconsistent spellings, ie. Roger de La Pasture for Rogier Van Der Weyden; John Van Eyck for Jan Van Eyck, Baciccio for Gaulli, etc.

2) Illustrations in the Burlington Index can be browsed according to media and artists, and for artist searches can be refined for works attributed to artists, formerly attributed, and a list of 10 other roles - for instance, one can search for prints after Raphael, for paintings formerly attributed to Giotto, Drawings from the circle of Michelangelo etc. This is simply not possible to do in Jstor.

This makes the Burlington digital photographic index, where users can search for images that appeared linked to exhibitions or in the art market, which then can be used to establish provenance and attribution history of works.

Content

1) In the Burlington Index there is the opportunity to browse a complete census of all the contributors who wrote for the Burlington Magazine. Especially in the first fifty years of publications, many contributors signed articles with their initials only. In the Index it has been taken great care to associate those initials with authors, whereas on JStor the initial RF and Roger Fry are quoted as two different authors. This is particularly important when establishing bibliographies or reconstructing the critical personality of an author.

2) Like for the illustrations, the contents indexed are vocabulary controlled. As above, many artist names have variable inconsistent spelling and variations, in the Burlington index they are cited consistently and linked to the Getty Ulan thesaurus to facilitate searching.

3) The keywords are vocabulary controlled as opposed to be a free text search. For instance, there could be articles of Chinese Aesthetics where the word 'Aesthetics'  is never used and so it would be missed, whereas in the Burlington articles on Chinese aesthetics have been clearly indexed as such. I would say that the Burlington really surpasses JSTOR in this more 'general keywords' search. For instance, if you try to search for "museums architecture" in JStor (Burlington Magazine 1903/03-1977/12), you obtain 1045 results, of which the first two are already false hits. In the Burlington Index, you will have 22 results of which only one is a false hit. Even more blatant the results for 'National Gallery architecture': over 1,500 hits in Jstor (of which 99.9% false) and 4 true hits in the Burlington Index.

4) In the Burlington Index searches can be highly refined. For instance, you can specify if you want to see results only pertaining to Vasari as an artist (opposed to a source) or Henry VII as patron (opposed to a simple subject) or Empoli as the artist Empoli as opposed to the town in Italy.

5) In the Burlington index you can browse critical lists of museums, private galleries, artists, collectors and patrons. This allows the user to gauge the depth of the indexing and makes the structure of the system more transparent.

These are all I would say differences within indexing and free text search. Then there are some limitations pertinent to JSTOR, the most annoying for me it is that all the articles in one page have the same code, so that, say you are searching for Picasso, you have a list of all the articles present in one page, even if only one of them has got the reference Picasso in them.

Lastly, there is one thing that Jstor does better than the Burlington because it is a free text search. If you are studying a minor personality, say the painter Nina Hamnett, JSTOR will give you all mentions (and some more, see point above) whereas in the Burlington you'll have only the most important critical citations.