VISUAL ARTS

The Visual Arts section of Resources for College Libraries identifies approximately 2500 titles that contribute to a core collection supporting undergraduate majors in art, art history, architecture, and allied disciplines. Resources in this section complement titles included in the last edition of Books for College Libraries.

The arrangement of resources generally reflects the organization of academic programs in the visual arts. The primary subject categories are Visual Arts in General, Design, Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Photography, Digital Arts and New Media, Sculpture, Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration, Landscape Architecture, Cultural Heritage, and Arts Management. Subcategories in each area generally cover reference sources, histories and handbooks, individual artists, materials and techniques. Some fields will have subcategories dealing with specialized topics relevant to that discipline. Titles are rarely duplicated among categories to avoid redundancy. The largest grouping, Visual Arts in General, lists titles that treat more than one medium and topics that apply to all disciplines.

As with other disciplines, the research in the visual arts is increasingly interdisciplinary and draws upon resources in from a variety of subject areas. Designers in digital media, for example, will employ computer software and their explanatory manuals. Art historians will explore historical and literary resources outside of the visual arts, just as architects will make use of resources relevant to a building type beyond strictly design literature. To maintain focus, with the expectation that the collective RCL will enrich this interdisciplinary perspective, most titles in the Visual Arts section will likely have subject headings associated with art, architecture, or a closely allied field, and the majority of resources will fall into the Library of Congress "N" classification scheme.

An overarching consideration has been to keep the scale of this section in the range of 2,500 titles, approximately 10% more than the count in BCL3. Preference for inclusion has been given to in-print academic titles ranked as 'outstanding' in Choice or rated as 'highly recommended' in Library Journal or other review sources. Titles which have been nominated for or have received an award, such as ARLIS/NA's George Wittenborn Award, have been included. As another selection consideration, the database WorldCat was used to identify the most popular academic titles acquired annually in each subject area since 1988.

Most resources in this section were published after 1988 and are in the English language. While books are the predominant format, a large number of web resources have been included, particularly if they are long-standing, hold original or professional content, or are rich sources of images. Periodicals have been excluded unless they were offered in the content of a selected website. A number of indexes or licensed databases provide arts information, but only five long-lived standards have been included here, ArtBibliographies Modern, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, Bibliography of the History of Art, Art Index Retrospective, and Art Full Text. Some freely available databases or databases provided in selected web resources have been included.

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