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Subjects: General Reference
Reference Resources
The resources in this section are selected to help you contextualize your research question and orient you to current and previous scholarship.
Timelines
Timelines situate your research historically, geographically, and disciplinarily and allow you to quickly identify the kinds of general topic overviews you should consult.
- Oxford Art Online: Timelines of World Art--Asia
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The timelines feature brief summaries of important events in the visual arts; many of the summaries are accompanied by an image, and all link to articles in Grove Art Online for further reading. - Heilbrunn Timeline of Art HistoryPresents a thematic, chronological, and geographical exploration of global art history through The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. The Timeline is structured with four components: Essays, which focus on specific themes in art history; Works of Art, which offer exemplary art contextualized chronologically, geographically, and thematically; Chronologies, which provide a linear outline of art history by geographical region; and Keywords, which are categorized by art movement and style, artists and makers, geography (present-day nation states and historical regions), time period, material and technique, object, and subject matter.
- Oxford Reference: Timelines
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270 Timelines, which can be easily narrowed to 13 discrete subject areas.
Encyclopedias, Handbooks, Histories, and Guides
Encyclopedias, Handbooks, Histories, and Guides offer general overviews of varying depth. These can be particularly useful for quickly orienting yourself to adjacent fields that impact your research question and for identifying key concepts that you will need to understand more fully in order to properly investigate your research question.
- Cambridge History of China
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The largest and most comprehensive history of China in the English language. Covers Chinese history from the 3rd century BC to the death of Mao Tse-tung. - Oxford Reference Encyclopdias: Asian History
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Comprehensive, scholarly, in-depth, and peer-reviewed summaries on Asian history.
- Oxford Very Short Introductions (series)
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Call Number: ONLINEEach volume offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects with the goal of making challenging topics highly readable in order to develop core knowledge.
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Covering all aspects of the visual arts, this collection includes such key reference works as the Grove Dictionary of Art, The Benezit Dictionary of Artists, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
Dictionaries, Glossaries, Vocabularies
Dictionaries, glossaries, and controlled vocabularies are useful for clarifying terms you've uncovered with which you're unfamiliar, as well as guiding you toward keywords for effective searching.
- Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art TermsAn accessible and useful A-Z, covering a wide range of terms from the visual art world, including materials, techniques, and important styles and periods. This resource is also searchable on the Oxford Art Online platform
- Getty Vocabularies
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Structured resources for the visual arts domain. Includes: Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Cultural Objects Name Authority, Union List of Artist Names, Iconography Authority, and Categories for the Description of Works of Art. - Flora of China
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Scientific descriptions of thousands of rare, medicinal, and economically important plants of China.
Bibliographies
Bibliographies are generally well-scoped and selective, thus allowing you to focus on a smaller set of studies within a field.
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
This is a key starting place for research in several different fields, providing bibliographies on current scholarship on topics from the social sciences and humanities.
- Oxford Bibliographies: Art History
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Annotated bibliographies on dozens of topics in art history studies listing authoritative, reliable, and relevant sources for research. Includes contextualizing introductions.
