Great news for art and art history researchers

As of April 1, 2010, the database Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) will be available free of charge on the Getty Research Institute Web site. In January of 2010 The Getty Research Institute announced that it was no longer financially feasible to maintain BHA and solicited other interested institutions to step forward and take over maintenance of the database. With no suitable arrangement immediately available, the Getty decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.

BHA on the Getty Web site offers both basic and advanced search modules, and can be searched easily by subject, artist, author, article or journal title, and other elements. Note that the database search includes both BHA (covering 1990-2007) and the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), covering the years 2008 and part of 2009. The Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), one of the predecessors of BHA, with records that cover 1975-1989, will be online by May 1.

The Bibliography of the History of Art is the most comprehensive art bibliography available worldwide, covering European and American visual arts from late antiquity to the present. This database indexes and abstracts art-related books, conference proceedings and dissertations, exhibition and dealers' catalogs, and articles from over 4,300 periodicals. Broad in scope, the bibliography's citations encompass fine arts-painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, architecture-as well as decorative and applied arts-crafts, graphic arts, and folk and popular art among them.

Please take advantage of this fantastic resource that Frostburg students, faculty, and staff wouldn't ordinarily have access to. Since this database is offered over the open Web and not via Research Port, you will not see the FIND IT button on any of the records. If you locate an item within the database you would like to get a hold of, please email me at kadetterbeck@frostburg.edu or call me at 301-687-4425 and I would be happy to help you get access to the resource.