New CDL-hosted Databases Available from the Web (Christine Bunting, UCSC)

a. Bibliography of Art (BHA)

The Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) is the most comprehensive art history bibliography available.  It includes abstracted articles from 2,500 international periodicals, books, conference proceedings, collected essays, exhibition and art dealer’s catalogs and dissertations.  The date coverage begins in 1973.

BHA’s half-million records cover the art of Europe and the Americas from late antiquity to the modern period in a wide range of media, including architecture and industrial design, painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, decorative and applied arts, and popular and folk art.

BHA is produced in collaboration by the Getty Research Institute and the French Institute de l’Information Scientifique du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, BHA’s broad scholarly focus makes it the primary reference for those studying art history as well as an important resource for researchers in many other fields looking for access to information on artistic culture.

Strong indexing in such areas as art historiography, archaeological and antiquarian literature, area and cultural studies, critical theory, as well as professional literature in art librarianship and visual resources curatorship, make it an especially rich resource.

b. SCIPIO

SCIPIO, the art and rare book catalog, originally a cooperative project of several libraries (the acronym stands for Sales Catalog Index Project Input Online), was formed to help researchers identify annually published auction catalogs; in its enriched form it now is a particularly valuable resource for those seeking information on the provenance of art objects and rare books, connoisseurship, the history of collecting and collectors, historical and contemporary market trends, and the relationship between art and economics.

SCIPIO is touted by RLG as the “only online union catalog of auction catalog records in existence.”  Art and rare book auction sales catalogs dating from 1599 to currently scheduled auctions can be searched.  Important private sales as well as sale catalogs from all major European and North American auction houses are covered in subject areas of world art from all time periods, books and manuscripts, painting, sculpture, drawing, prints and photographs, furniture, decorative and applied arts, musical instruments, and objets d’art.