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- FYW: Inside the White Cube
- Background information
FYW: Inside the White Cube
How to approach background research
Your initial background research is when you're just getting topic ideas and overviews and collecting keywords.
This is a great time to use the comfortable, casual tools and resources that aren't going to end up in your final references list, like Wikipedia, Google, and Microsoft Copilot.
The library also has reference databases and encyclopedias that offer broad overviews of topics--check out the recommendations below.
Reference databases
- Grove Art OnlineScholarly art encyclopedia covering all aspects of Western and non-Western visual art. Iincludes the full text of The Dictionary of Art, containing more than 45,000 articles (more than 21,000 biographies and 500,000 bibliographical citations). Also includes images of the most frequently studied works of art.
- Biography (Gale In Context)Combines over 280,000 biographies from sources such as Contemporary Authors, Encyclopedias of World Biography, Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Contemporary Musicians, Historic World Leaders, & more.
- Biography Reference BankContains biographical full-text articles, page images, abstracts and articles from magazines and journals—providing current coverage of an individual’s life and work.
- Credo ReferenceProvides access to more than 1300 titles, covering every major subject - from art to medicine, psychology to history, and technology to literature.
- Gale EbooksGale eBooks is a Database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
- Oxford Reference OnlineIndexes the full text of over 100 Oxford subject encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Find reference books
Find subject encyclopedias and dictionaries through the library catalog by adding your keyword(s) to this reference-specific search:
Featured Reference Books
Art: The World of Art, from Aboriginal to American Pop, Renaissance Masters to Postmodernism by Call Number: Reference Collection ; N5300 .A693 2002Publication Date: 2002
The Concise Dictionary of Art Terms (2 ed.) by Publication Date: 2010
A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (3 ed.) by Publication Date: 2015
Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art by Call Number: Reference Collection ; N7560 .H34 2008Publication Date: 2008On course reserve for this class
