Subjects Covered
Advertising Art, Antiques, Archaeology, Architecture and Architectural History, Art History, Crafts, Decorative Arts, Folk Art, Graphic Arts, Industrial Design, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, Motion Pictures, Museology, Non-Western Art, Painting, Photography, Pottery, Sculpture, Television, Textiles

Art Index Retrospective, produced by The H.W. Wilson Company, is a bibliographic database that cumulates citations to Art Index volumes 1-32 of the printed index published between 1929-1984. The database cites articles from periodicals published throughout the world. Periodical coverage includes English-language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, as well as periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. In addition to articles, Art Index Retrospective indexes reproductions of works of art that appear in indexed periodicals.

Contents

Fields 
Document Types List
Illustration Abbreviations List
Languages List
Physical Description List
Journal List
Using Limit Fields
Sample Searches
Stopwords

The AN field contains a unique 12-digit number that identifies the document.

The AR field identifies the name of the artist and the title of the illustration of the artist's work that accompanies the article.

Listed after the title of each work is the term (illustration). You can search for this term in the AR field. The number (if any) listed after the title indicates the number of illustrations of that particular work. You can search for any word or phrase in a title. The terms col, det, or other such abbreviations describe the illustration itself.

When the document type is art reproduction, the AR field contains the name of the artist who created the original work.

Author's names can be searched with or without hyphens. When searching without hyphens, type last name followed by first name or first name followed by last name. The order of the words does not matter.

When searching an author's name with hyphens, type the last name first and hyphenate all names and initials. Use truncation (*) if your are not sure about spelling.

You can search personal author names by last name, using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index).

AUT Author Name
(a limit field)

The AUT field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the document. Use Browse to search for the author by last name in this Author Name index. The AUT field is for searching only; it does not display in the record.

The DE field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the document. This field can include personal names, uniform titles, topical terms, organization names, and geographic names.

For an art reproduction the DE field lists the name and dates of the artist.

You can search terms in the DE field with or without hyphens. In the example above, painting in de retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word painting, such as painting-american-exhibitions or painting-technique. The search painting-technique in de retrieves records with just that specific descriptor. Search on painting- if you want only those records indexed with the single descriptor painting.

You can search for Descriptors using the SU Subject index in Browse (Index).

DT Document Type
(a limit field)

The Document Type field describes the contents of the original document. Use the DT field to limit your search to records of a particular type of document, such as an art reproduction or a motion picture review. Include hyphens for multi-word document types.

IS ISSN
(a limit field)

The IS field lists the International Standard Serial Number. Include hyphens when searching for an ISSN.

JI Journal Issue
(a limit field)

The JI Journal Issue field lists the issues of journals included in the database. You can search for a specific issue of a journal using the JI Index in Browse (Index).

JN Journal Name
(a limit field)

The JN Journal Name field lists the names of the journals included in the database. You can search for a specific journal using the JN index in Browse (Index).

LA Language of Article
(a limit field)

The LA field lists the language of the original document. When searching, use the full language name. Art Index Retrospective includes both English and non-English language works.

NT Notes

The Notes field contains additional information not included in other fields in the database. It gives the pagination for subjects in some long articles.

The OT field provides additional article access. It may include descriptive words to augment the title. In this database, the word reproduction is added to art-reproduction document types.

PD Physical Description
(a limit field)

The PD field contains details about illustrative or graphic material that appears in the original document. It contains one or more codes or descriptive phrases.

PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The Publication Year lists the year in which the document was published. This field is range searchable.

SO Source (

The Source field indicates the bibliographic source of the entry, including the journal name, volume number, publication date, and page numbers. You can search for any word or phrase in this field. If a search operator (OR, AND, NOT, IN, WITH, or NEAR) appears in the title for which you are searching, enclose it within quotes, as shown in the example.

See the Journals List for a complete list of journals in the database.

SU Subject
(a limit field)

The SU field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the document. The field can include personal names, topical names, organization names, geographic names, and uniform titles. This field is for browsing subject headings (descriptors) using the SU Subject index in Browse (Index). The SU field does not display in the record. Subject headings display in the DE Descriptor field.

The Title field contains the title of the original document. For art reproductions the medium of the original work is listed in parentheses after the title. You can search for any word or phrase in a title. The following is a list of abbreviations used to describe the medium of the original work.

Abbreviation Medium

drwg drawings
engr engraving(s)
etch etching(s)
litho lithograph(s)
paint painting(s)
photo photograph
sculp sculpture

The Citation (CITN) in Art Index Retrospective consists of the TI, AU, SO, DE, and DT fields. These fields are the default display for this database.

The Artist and Work (AR) field, which identifies the name of the artist and the title of the artist's work being cited as a reproduction or accompanying an article, uses several abbreviations that indicate the form taken by the art and/or its location in the source work. Following is a list of abbreviations used in the AR field:

col color
cov(s) cover(s)
det(s) detail(s)
p page
pl(s) plate(s)

View the most current Journal List.

The limit fields (PY, PD, IS, LA, DT, and AN), when combined with other search terms, are particularly useful for focusing or limiting a search. To search a limit field, use the in or = operators with the field abbreviation, such as 1979 in py or py=1979. Omitting the field label retrieves information from free text (non-limit) fields only.

For limit fields containing numeric data (PY, IS, AN), you can also use other special operators:

= equal to,
such as py=1975

< less than,
such as py<1975

> greater than,
such as py>1975

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1975

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1975

- indicates a range,
such as py=1970-1979

Below are several examples of the types of searches you can use to retrieve information from the Art Index Retrospective database.

To see all authors with the same last name or to see variations of an author's name, use the Browse (Index). You can search for author names using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index). For example, to look for articles by Edie Lee Cohen:

1. Go to Browse (Index).
2. Select the AUT Author Name index.
3. Type cohen.

You can search for an art reproduction using the DT field. For example, let's look for articles citing mother with child.

1. First conduct a search for the terms mother near child. Using the NEAR operator looks for records with the two terms in the same sentence.

2. Next search for and art-reproduction in dt. This request limits the search to the art reproduction document type. Beginning the search request with the AND operator automatically adds it to the previous search.

Artists' names appear in the Artist and Work field and are hyphenated with the last name first. For example, let's look for articles about the artist Henry Moore.

Conduct a search for moore henry in ar. This request limits your search to the Artist and Work field.

If you are unsure of the artist name you can select the name directly from the SU Subject index in Browse (Index).

Certain words of little intrinsic meaning appear too frequently to be useful in searching text. Information systems call these "stopwords"; you will not be able to search for the following words alone in the Art Index Retrospective database. They can be included within a phrase, but they will be ignored.

an
and
are
for
from
in
not
of
or
that
the
was
were
which
with