Databases

A multi-disciplinary database that covers millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources including podcasts, transcripts and videos.

Academic Video Online provides nearly 80,000 titles spanning subjects from anthropology to zoology. Curated for curricular relevance, this streaming video database includes feature films, documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs, newsreels, and demonstrations.

Browse by Channels to see what's available by subject or source, or search by title.

A comprehensive resource for art information featuring indexing and abstracting of over 600 periodicals dating back to 1984, including 280 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracting of over 13,000 art dissertations, and indexing of almost 200,000 art reproductions, which provide examples of styles and art movements, including works by emerging artists. The database covers fine, decorative and commercial art, folk art, photography, film, and architecture, and also includes a database-specific thesaurus.

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities; it fully covers 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. It contains a current total of over 2.5 million records. Subjects covered include archaeology, art, architecture, Asian studies, classics, dance, folklore, history, language, linguistics, literary reviews, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, radio, television, & film, religion and theatre. As of January 2000, the Arts & Humanities Index contains searchable, full-length, English-language author abstracts.

Artstor is now on JSTOR. The Artstor website will be retired on August 1, 2024. To learn more, visit Welcome to JSTOR from Artstor. If you have image groups on Artstor, they will automatically be copied over to your personal JSTOR Workspace starting February 1, 2024.

Online access to approximately 400,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines which document artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures, and which focus on, but are not limited to, the arts. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well as by art historians, and to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities.

This freely available database provides information on over 200,000 artists, with a focus on American artists from the early 16th-Century through the present. Some services are restricted to subscribers: McMaster currently does not have a subscription.

BHA (Bibliography of the History of Art) 1990-2007 and RILA (Répertoire international de la littérature de l'art) 1975-1989 cover European and American visual arts material including articles from over 1,200 journals. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007. 

The online Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) indexes literature on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.  In addition, special projects have contributed substantian numbers of additional citations to the database, among them references to journals on Southeast Asia dating as far back as 1779.

Through 1991, the BAS included citations to Western-language periodical articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften.  However, monographs published since 1992 have not been added, and sources such as WorldCat should be consulted instead.

British Periodicals provides access to the searchable full text of British periodicals from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century (the same periodicals as are covered in the UMI microfilm collection "Early British Periodicals"). It includes millions of high-resolution facsimile page images. Subject areas covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.

Cambridge Companions are a series of guides to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods. With over 600 titles and 4,000 essays, it offers subject or theme based cross-searchable collections, available in three sub-collections: Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture, and Cambridge Companions to Music.

Cambridge Histories is a series reference works of over 400 volumes spanning fifteen subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, with a concentration on political and cultural history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, music and the arts.

Documents the careers of some of Canada's leading professional artists, designers, art writers and curators, as well as some important Canadian art institutions and organizations that have helped shape the Canadian art scene since the 1960s. The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA) Canadian Art Database Project is a work in progress with the overall objective of broadening public awareness of contemporary Canadian Art in Canada and abroad.

The CCCA is also taking on additional projects containing information that informs and lays the groundwork for the core project. A wide range of previously hard to access material [images, texts, media works, and related ephemera]from a variety of sources across Canada is being assembled into the fully searchable, bilingual, database.

Currently contents: 54,000+ images and 600+ video and audio clips by 600+ artists and designers; and 1,600+ texts by 200+ writers and curators.

Indexes publications produced by Canadian governments (federal, provincial, territorial & municipal), government agencies & departments, research institutes and government laboratories. Full-text of reports will be available in the Microlog microfiche collection in MILLS Government Publications (2nd floor).  

Cross-search over 30 indexing, abstracting, and fulltext databases in a range of subjects.

This collection of primary source documents captures the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of settlers and indigenous people living in colonial frontiers of North America, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand from 1650-1920. More than 20% of the content is Canadian, with over 1,000 documents drawn from the Hudson's Bay Archive and the Glenbow Museum.

Grove Art Online contains 45,000 articles on every aspect of the visual arts - painting, sculpture, graphic arts, architecture, decorative arts and photography - from prehistory to the present day. Compiled over a period of 15 years, it represents the work of more than 6,800 scholars from around the world, each writing on his or her own specialist field of study. There are ongoing additions of new and updated articles, over 3,000 thumbnail art images and line drawings displayed in the text of articles, extensive image links, and sophisticated search and navigation tools.

Oxford Art Online includes Grove Art Online, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.

Includes the complete runs of the US and UK editions of Harper’s Bazaar, from 1867 to the present (US edition) and 1929-2015 (UK edition). The issues are reproduced as high-resolution color page images and supported by fully searchable text and article-level indexing. The magazine covers over 150 years of American, British, and international fashion, society, and popular culture, facilitating academic research in wide-ranging fields such as women’s studies, fashion, marketing, advertising, material culture, design, and more. It chronicles of some of the most influential work from world-renowned designers, models, photographers,stylists, and illustrators of the period.

As HathiTrust members, McMaster students, faculty and staff have access to a digital repository that includes millions of items from research libraries around the world. The collection includes both in-copyright materials and public domain materials. Full-text material primarily consists of books and other items published before 1923. This includes a large collection of U.S. government documents and a growing collection of Canadian government publications. New material is added daily. 

Provides detailed indexing and abstracts for almost 700 periodicals covering the humanities (of which 470 are peer-reviewed), including feature articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, as well as reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more. Subject coverage includes archaeology, classical studies, art, performing arts, philosophy, history, music, linguistics, literature, and religion. 

Key indexing database for publications on Islam, the Middle East and the Muslim world, covering almost 100 years of publication. It is produced by an editorial team working at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, established to transmit knowledge about Islamic and Middle East studies. Material cited in the Index Islamicus includes not only work written about the Middle East, but also about the other main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere. Over 3,000 journals are monitored for inclusion in the database, together with conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and book reviews.

Provides access to 60,000+ color and black and white photographic reproductions of Christian medieval art searchable by subject, work of art and bibliography. Records have textual information and bibliographies about the images and may also include a published image of the work. Some restriction of images occurs due to copyright restrictions, however bibliography references to published images are usually provided. Covers Western and Eastern Orthodox Christianity primarily, but the term Christian is broadly interpreted and includes Jewish, Islamic, and non-ecclesiastical subjects as well, and is without geographical limitations. The art is diverse in theme, media, and motif. Freely available as of July 1, 2023. 

An online bibliographyof secondary source material pertaining to the Renaissance and Medieval periods in Europe from 400 to 1700. Citations for books and journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies) are included, as are citations for dissertation abstracts and essays in books (including entries in conference proceedings, festschriften, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogues).

JSTOR provides access to a digital archive of journals in the areas of Arts, Business, Economics, and Sciences. JSTOR includes the entire runs of these journals, from the very first issue to the volumes published a few years ago. With a small number of exceptions - the "Current Scholarship" titles - JSTOR is a backfile collection and excludes the most recent issues (as part of the terms of the agreement with the journal publishers).

McMaster's subscription to  Kanopy provides online access to over 7,000 documentary films from a range of major producers, including PBS, California Newsreel, Kino Lober, Documentary Educational Resources, and many more.  Videos can be integrated with Avenue to Learn and accessed remotely by students.  The majority of the videos are closed captioned, and clip-making is allowed.  Transcripts are also available by clicking on the 'More' tab.

Full screen mode and playback speeds can be adjusted upon clicking the "Play" button of the video.

To access additional features such as creating a Clip/Playlist, Adding comments or sharing via social media, a personal login  (eg. Google) is recommended.

Further information is available at the Kanopy Help page

OpenBibArt is a bibliographic database born out of a collaboration between the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique of the CNRS (Inist-CNRS). OpenBibArt reviews the literature on arts from Late Antiquity to the present day, providing access to close to 1.2 million of bibliographic records of periodicals, books, exhibition and auction catalogues, published between 1910 and 2007.

OpenBook Publishers is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. Monographs and textbooks in all subject areas are published and all books are available to read free online.

Contains more than 16,000 images of outdoor advertisements (i.e., billboards, shelter ads, wall murals, posters, etc.) and other scenes from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. Browse or search the collection by company name, product, date, place of coverage, subject, tone and medium.

Major online periodical archive that makes the backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available electronically. PAO contains over 700 journals spanning more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages. McMaster's subscription includes PAO collections 1-10.

This unique group of 4,700 photographs records a broad range of artists working in the United States during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Created by the fine art photography firm Peter A. Juley & Son (active 1896-1975). Highlights of the collection include portraits of Thomas Hart Benton, Selma Burke, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Barnett Newman, Diego Rivera and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Many of the images show artists in their studios or at home with their families and offer interesting glimpses into the artistic and social climate in which they worked. The collection also contains hundreds of group photographs documenting activities at the National Academy of Design and Art Students League in New York City as well as the summer art colonies at Provincetown, Old Lyme, Woodstock, and Ogunquit.

Contains thousands of full-text e-books across a variety of disciplines. To display titles accessible to McMaster users, use the "Book Status" filter and select "Owned and subscribed to by my library." 

Individual titles are also listed in McMaster's library catalogue and in the standard ProQuest databases platform.