Art, Design & Architecture Collection: Sample Searches

Please note that the links below will only work if you are authenticated to Art, Design & Architecture Collection through your organization.

Basic Search

You are studying the art of different cultures and regions of the world.  African Art has piqued your interest, in particular, art of the Chokwe people.  

By inserting the word chokwe into the Basic Search box, your results with reveal anything with the keyword of chokwe in the details of the results.  Your organization may default to search anywhere including full text or anywhere except full text.  Keep this in mind.

At this point you can check boxes related to narrowing by only Full text, Peer reviewed and/or Scholarly journals.  Or you can wait for the results to determine if you want to narrow or not.

You will receive the entire list of results typically sorted by relevancy.  (And it may be searching all fields or everything BUT full-text depending on your organization's default search settings).

From the list of results, you can sort by date (ascending or descending) as well as narrow by the following filters:

• Full text
• Peer reviewed
• Scholarly journal or other source types
• Source type
• Publication date range
• Publication titles
• Document types
• Subject
• Company/organization
• Location
• Person
• Language (of original publication)

Advanced Search

You would like to find information on outsider art but that is not in a scholarly journal.  While you could use a keyword search in the Basic Search box, a more refined, specific way to search is by using the Thesaurus and narrowing facets:

• From Advanced Search form, click on the Thesaurus, navigating to the O section. Click on the term outsider art.  Make sure the checkbox is checked and click on Add to Search. Subject term outsider art will be added to open text search box.
  • The narrower terms of prison art and yard art may also be selected and combined using or/and/not.
  • Hint:  combining using OR will reveal more results; AND will reveal less results.
• From the results, in Document Type, select More options.  Good options would be anything near the bottom of the list, those document types with only one or a few results. Select to Include Essay. ABM returns an essay from a book entitled Asylum art: the social construction of an aesthetic category.
• Return to the search and try other narrowing options. 

Publications

Use this page to locate publications covered in this database, search within those publications, and browse the available issues.

You want to discover which publications have Africa in the title.

• From the Publications Search box, enter africa.
• Click on the publication title to be taken to the publication’s search page and the list of available issues.
• To browse the most recent issue indexed, select the most recent year, month, and issue to view all the documents published in that particular issue.