And my paltry suggestion was the Hathi Trust…useful facets for drilling down, too. Worked for me.
Kathy Edwards
Associate Librarian
Research, Instruction & Collection Development
Emery A. Gunnin Architecture Library
2-112 Lee Hall / 864.656.4289
ORCID: 0000-0002-0501-7448
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Any member of the Visual Resources Division would remind researchers that an image specialist could point you to picture resources where images could be found, often in well-indexed catalogues that may be analog as well as electronic (most notably for the first inquiry, the magnificent indexes at Princeton cited below by Sara). Millions of images of the great picture collections of the Bildarchiv Marburg, Royal Institute of British Architects, and Witt Library were systematically microfilmed in the 1970-90s and are located in libraries all over (but sadly not indexed – you still need to sit at a microfilm reader and browse but serendipitously discover other treasures. Great for provenance research). Photo libraries like the National Gallery of Art (check the link in my signature below), the Frick, Getty, Marburg, Courtauld and others are part of the Pharos Consortium (http://pharosartresearch.org/) that while still in its nascent phase, will one day be a crucial place for picture research in Art History. Since Janine brought up botany, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural Science has been digitizing their herbarium collection. (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany). It is amazing. I am certainly not discounting the vast image resources of a book library but even a humble – and probably mothballed slide collection will yield unique images photographed by scholars or simple tourist that may have not yet made the printed page.
This is the beauty of ARLIS-L (and ARLIS/NA of course!) that one can easily tap into the collective knowledge and generosity of our community for problem solving of inquiries like this.
Well done ARLIS!
Gregg
Gregory P. J. Most
Chief, Department of Image Collections
Library
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC 20565
mailing address: 2000-B South Club Drive, Landover, MD 20785
telephone: 202.842.6100
Love this!!
Even just the paper collection is astounding..and a lot of it is already subject sorted—my small library of 14-15000 books probably has a million images minimum in it…it always surprises them!
--anne
Janine and Rebecca:
I often start my image-research classes by asking the class what our largest image collection is. They guess ArtStor or university archives. I tell them it’s the book collection in the library.
It’s worth it, as you emphasized, to highlight the ease at searching images in hard-copy, too.
Thanks for this.
Lee
Just a reminder not to discount looking for images in books!
Searching my library’s catalog, I retrieve a number of digitized books in EEBO and in the Biodiversity Heritage Library using keywords ‘trees grafting.’ But you can also try these subject headings:
Grafting--Early works to 1800
Gardening--Early works to 1800
Fruit-culture--Early works to 1800
(and maybe even: Trees in art)
And the latest issue of AL Direct includes a link to the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr site:https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/ (“more than 55 million pages of literature, some of which date back to the 15th century. Some 158,000 illustrations are available for free download in high-resolution files”).
For that matter, I also recommend looking for articles and dissertations (perhaps combining different variations of terms such as “Virgil Eclogues grafting”) to see what others have gathered up on the topic.
Happy image hunting!
Janine J. Henri
Architecture and Design Librarian
Arts Library
1400 Public Affairs Building
Box 959312
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1392
Tel: 310-206-4587
Fax: 310-825-1303
Yes, always an interesting topic. Thanks for letting us know about that research guide, Sara, I’ve bookmarked it. An ARLIS/NA colleague asked a question awhile back, and I’ve dug up my answer to it to see what I said at the time. It was in reference to James Hall’s
Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, which requires some knowledge of variant names, biblical history and such, but is very robust compared to other sources, apparently. I actually have that source listed on one of my LibGuides, which hasn’t been updated in a while (although I just added a link to Sara’s guide too):
https://libguides.princeton.edu/artfaq/iconography .
Here was my response to the Hall question:
I have never been fully satisfied with the suggestions I’ve made about iconography/iconographic sources to library users over the years. I know that ArtStor allows some keyword searching but metadata varies (when one wants to search for the subject of a particular work). In addition to my guide (URL above), we have add’l. titles in our ref. room, one being Hall’s Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art (Olderr, 1992) with small illustrations next to entries. I also just saw the Reverse Symbolism Dictionary: Symbols Listed by Subject, which I never use nor recommend so need to take a look at it.
-Rebecca Friedman, Marquand Library, Princeton Univ.
Iconography! A favorite topic. We have a subject guide with the name Signs & Symbols, which is the LCSH. I hope this is helpful. Director for Library Services
University Libraries
University of the Arts
320 South Broad Street
Good Morning,
One of my faculty has posed a question that is out of my depth.
“. . . it's been a while since I consulted an index to iconography. In the day there were enormous multi-volume sets in various languages in the reference room. Do such works exist any longer or is everything online? In either case, is there any source in particular you'd recommend? I'm looking for images of the grafting of fruit trees, specifically illustrations of a verse from Virgil (Eclogues 9) but actually any image of arboreal grafting produced in Europe before about 1860
”
Can someone point at struggling musician/librarian in the right direction?
Dr. Matt Stock
Associate Professor/Fine & Applied Arts Librarian
University Libraries
University of Oklahoma
(405)325-4243
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