Browse our full list of subscription and open-access databases below, or filter by subject or type. BGC users can also access Bard College’s databases.
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Academic Search Premier provides full-text access to thousands of scholarly publications, covering a wide range of academic subjects in the humanities and sciences.
Accessible Archives contains primary source materials about the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries found in historic newspapers, periodicals, and books.
Ad*Access is a project from Duke University Libraries that presents images and information for advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines in the first half of the 20th century.
Africa Commons provides access to African historical and cultural materials, and is comprised of four modules: History and Culture is an index and search engine for books, magazines, and primary sources related to African history and culture; Black South African Magazines is a digital collection of magazines created for Black African audiences from 1937 to 1973; Southern African Films and Documentaries provides streaming access to African documentaries, oral histories, and other films from the 1900s to the early 2000s; and The Hilary Ng’weno Archive is a collection of magazines, newspapers, and films from Kenyan journalist, historian, and physicist Hilary Ng’weno.
The AHRnet Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 includes biographical and historical data on over 45,000 architects, painters, sculptors, designers, craftspeople, firms, studios, workshops, guilds, and organisations.
America: History and Life indexes journals published worldwide on the history of the United States and Canada.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection provides full-text access to a comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912.
American Periodicals Series offers access to the full text of early American magazines, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, and children's and women's magazines, published between 1740 and 1940.
Ancestry.com provides access to billions of genealogical records, including census and voter lists, birth, marriage and death records, and immigration, travel, and military records. Note: A username and password are required for access; please contact library staff for log-in information.
Anthropology Plus combines two important anthropology indexes: Anthropological Literature from Harvard University, and the Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute in the U.K.
AnthroSource provides access to the full text of current and legacy content from journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
Archive-It is a web archiving service for collecting and accessing online cultural heritage. Collections of archived websites, chosen for preservation by libraries and museums around the world, are available to browse and search.
ArchiveGrid brings together millions of records describing primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies around the world.
The Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, developed by the Frick's Center for the History of Collecting, helps users find repositories that hold primary source material related to American collectors, dealers, agents, and advisors, from the 18th century to the present.
The Archives of American Art is a research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America. Many of the collections have been digitized, including material from ACA Galleries, Florence Knoll Bassett, George Grey Barnard, Jacques Seligmann & Co, the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts In America, and many more.
Archives Portal Europe provides information from international institutions that hold archival material on and from Europe. The records and digitized objects from these institutions can be searched or browsed.
Archnet is a collection of images, texts, and other media focused on the built environment of societies in which Muslims are or have been a significant cultural presence.
AATA Online is database containing abstracts of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage.
Art & Architecture Archive provides access to the full text of art and architecture magazines, dating from the late-19th century to the 21st, including Apollo, American Craft, and Craft Horizons. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography.
A&AePortal is an ebook resource featuring scholarship in the history of art, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and design. Publishing partners include Yale University Press, Bard Graduate Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University Press, MIT Press, Princeton University Press, Yale University Art Gallery, Dallas Museum of Art, Paul Mellon Centre, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and more.
Art & Architecture Source features full-text articles, as well as detailed indexing and abstracts, for an array of sources on fine art, decorative art, commercial art, architecture, and architectural design.
Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a version of Worldcat that allows users to search the collections of art libraries around the world.
Art History Research net (AHR net) consists of three related and linked databases. ReVIEW provides full text of important decorative and fine arts journals published in Europe and the USA during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Arts + Architecture Profiles includes biographical data on thousands of artists, architects, and designers. Lastly, Design Abstracts Retrospective (DAR) contains abstracts of decorative arts, applied arts, and design journals published between 1900-1986. This database includes over 60,000 entries, and complements the Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI), whose coverage begins in 1973.
Art Index Retrospective is an index to articles published between 1929 and 1984 on fine, decorative, and commercial art.
ARTbibliographies Modern indexes articles, as well as some books and exhibition catalogs, published on all aspects of modern and contemporary art. Entries date back to the late 1960s, with full coverage starting from 1974.
ARTFL Project contains nearly 2,000 texts in French, ranging from classical works of French literature to various kinds of nonfiction, prose, and technical writing. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises.
Artnet's Decorative Art and Antiques Database contains auction records of millions of decorative art objects from ancient antiquities to contemporary decorative arts. Results includes comprehensive descriptions, provenance information, bibliographies, images, and essays from the actual auction catalog, as well as estimates and prices realized. Sales results go back to January 2000.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals is a comprehensive listing of journal articles published worldwide from the 1930s to the present, covering the history and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, historic preservation, and interior design and decoration.
Berg Fashion Library offers fully cross-searchable access to an expanding range of resources, including the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, ebooks, reference works, images, and more.
Bibliography of Asian Studies contains records on all subjects (especially humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present, referencing principally Western-language articles and book chapters.
Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), along with the Répertoire international de la littérature de l'art (RILA), index and abstract 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 Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections.
The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive is a project that focuses on Black craftspeople in the 18th-century South Carolina Lowcountry and 19th-century Tennessee. The database includes hundreds of records documenting the lives and experiences of Black craftspeople involved in 45 trades.
The Black Music History Library is a collection of bibliographies about the Black origins of traditional and popular music dating from the 17th century to present day. Resources listed include books, articles, documentaries, series, and podcasts.
The Blue Mountain Project contains fully searchable issues of important art, music, and literary journals of the European avant-garde.
Of the British Museum’s more than 7 million objects, 2 million have been catalogued, and of those nearly 500,000 objects have at least one digital image available online. The museum’s collection covers the history of human activity, with objects representing ancient Europe, ancient Greece and Rome, and virtually all non-Western cultures from their pre-history to present. The museum makes all of its digital images freely available for educational use, including limited-run academic publishing, and although the readily available digital images are quite good, it also has a registration-based system wherein users can request that ultra-high quality renditions be sent to them by e-mail.
C19: The 19th-Century Index provides access to millions of bibliographic records for 19th-century source materials, including books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers, archives, and reference material.
Calisphere is an online image resource made available by the University of California system. It offers access to digitized primary sources documenting the history of the state of California, from its origins through the 1970s. Materials are browsable by subject or by thematic collections, and are searchable by keyword.
Cambridge Companions is a series of guides that offer introductions to literature, classics, music, philosophy, religion, and culture.
Cambridge Histories Online offers full-text access to a series of reference volumes on political, economic, and social history, and the philosophy and literature of selected countries and subjects.
The Chicago Manual of Style Online is a guide to style, usage, grammar, and citation. The online version includes the Chicago Citation Quick Guide and Chicago Style Q&A.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a news and information organization dedicated to covering current issues in colleges, universities, and higher education.
Chronicling America is a collection of digitized American historical newspapers, including many smaller regional papers, dating from the 1750s-1960s. The site also includes a Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries, which is a searchable index of newspapers published in the United States since 1690.
The Classical Art Research Centre (CARC)'s antiquities databases allow users to search for pottery, gems, sculpture, architectural terracottas, and more from sources including the Beazley Archive and the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
The Cleveland Museum of Art makes available thousands of images representing objects from its encyclopedic collection.
Commercial Pattern Archive (CoPA) is a collection of commercial sewing pattern data, including images, from several large commercial pattern collections in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Conservation and Art Materials Encyclopedia Online (CAMEO) is a database that compiles, defines, and disseminates technical information on the distinct collection of terms, materials, and techniques used in the fields of art conservation and historic preservation.
Country Life Archive is a full-text collection containing every page and issue of this historical British culture and lifestyle magazine, from its first issue in 1897 (when it was known as Country Life Illustrated) to 2005.
Culinary Arts Collection includes major cooking and nutrition magazines, culinary journals, and reference titles. Coverage includes thousands of searchable recipes, restaurant reviews, and industry information from 1980 to the present.
Cultural Magazines of Latin America is a digitized collection of cultural magazines from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru and Puerto Rico, dating from the period between 1880 and 1930.
Database Machine Drawings (DMD) was developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and makes available more than 1,600 high-quality digital images of Medieval and Renaissance (1235–1650) mechanical drawings. Users can make use of either simple or advanced search parameters for finding images, and the metadata is extremely thorough from image to image.
The David Rumsey Map Collection offers users access to more than 130,000 digital images of rare maps and other cartographic material, focused on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The images are made available through a number of different platforms, including a georeferencer that allows users to overlay historic maps on modern maps.
Trial subscription ends on May 31. De Gruyter is an academic publisher, publishing over 1,500 books and 16,000 journal articles every year across 30 subject areas.
Design & Applied Arts Index (DAAI) abstracts and indexes articles, news items, and reviews published in design and applied arts periodicals from 1973 to the present. Full-text access is provided for some periodicals. Subjects covered in this database include textiles, ceramics, glass, jewelry, furniture, graphic and industrial design, and advertising.
Digital Bodleian contains over one million images of items from the University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries special collections, Oxford College libraries, and other Oxford institutions. Digitized material includes manuscripts, archives, printed books, maps, ephemera, photography, and more.
The Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture collects and creates electronic resources for study and research of the decorative arts, with a particular focus on Early America. Included are electronic texts and journals, image databases, and information on organizations, museums and research facilities.
The Digital Public Library of America brings together digitized collections from American libraries, archives, and museums, allowing them to be searched in one platform. The collection’s topics range from the written word, documentary images, works of art and culture, records of America’s heritage, and scientific efforts.
Domus Archive provides full access to Domus, an Italian architecture and design magazine, including all issues since its 1928 launch to the latest issue. Note: A username and password are required for access; please contact library staff for log-in information.
Duke Digital Collections include digitized historic photographs, advertisements, texts, and more from Duke's library collections.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America, and works in English printed elsewhere, from 1473 to 1700.
Early European Books Online contains digital facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access sources printed in Europe from the origin of printing to the end of the 17th century.
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) offers digital images of every page of significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, as well as thousands from the Americas. The Library subscribes to Parts I and II of the database.
Epact brings together images and information about medieval and Renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford; the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence; the British Museum, London; and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
Europeana provides access to images, texts, audio and video recordings, and more from European museums, archives, and libraries.
Flickr Commons brings together selections of digitized collections from over a hundred cultural heritage institutions around the world. Users can keyword search across collections in The Commons or browse by participating institutions.
Gale OneFile: News offers full-text access to major U.S. and international newspapers, as well as radio and TV broadcasts and transcripts, from 1980 to the present.
Gale OneFile: Pop Culture Studies offers full-text access to journals and magazines that both analyze and contribute to popular culture from 1980 to the present.
Gale OneFile: Popular Magazines provides full-text access to the most searched magazines across OneFile products from 1980 to the present.
Gale OneFile: Religion and Philosophy provides full-text access to periodical content covering topics across a wide range of philosophies and religions.
Gale OneFile: Science offers full-text access to journals in the sciences, with key subjects including the biological sciences, physics, geology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and technology, from 1980 to the present.
Gallica is a free digital library maintained by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). It provides access to a wide range of art-historical resources, including books, manuscripts, newspapers and magazines, auction catalogs, maps, images, objects, audio and video recordings, and more.
The J. Paul Getty Museum offers a searchable and browsable image database of many items in its collections, including decorative arts objects.
Getty Research Portal makes available an extensive collection of digitized texts related to art, architecture, material culture, and related fields, from a range of institutions.
Getty Vocabularies offers structured vocabulary resources for art, architecture, decorative arts, and other material culture. These include the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN).
Google Patents indexes patents and patent applications from around the world, including full-text documents from many patent offices.
Harvard Digital Collections provides access to over six million digital items from Harvard's collections, including manuscripts, archives, rare books, photographs, maps, audio-visual material, and more.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Reading access is available to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law.
The Humanities Index covers humanities journals and weekly magazines published in the UK and other English speaking countries, as well as newspapers published in the UK, from 1962 to the present.
Images from the History of Medicine provides access to the digitized collections of the History of Medicine Division of the US National Library of Medicine. It includes portraits, photographs, posters, graphic arts, and more, illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine from the 15th to the 21st century.
Index to 19th-Century Art Periodicals offers a complete index of available issues from 42 art journals published in the US during the 19th century, and includes articles, art notes, illustrations, stories, poems, and advertisements.
The IADDB brings together collections of posters, advertisements, commercials, tunes, books, magazines, journals, and more from a range of institutions, galleries, and private collectors around the world.
International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) is a comprehensive index of scholarship in medieval studies, covering geographic areas across the globe. IMB indexes books, journal articles, and miscellany volumes (conference proceedings, collected essays, and exhibition catalogues).
Internet Archive serves as a free digital library with access to millions of books, videos, audio, images, websites, software programs, and more. It also hosts the Wayback Machine, a digitial archive of web-based content.
Iter Bibliography is comprised of citations for secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including books, journals, and dissertations.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include peer-reviewed scholarly journals, literary journals, academic monographs, research reports, and primary sources.
The Library of Congress Digital Collections brings together a vast array of digitized materials that document U.S. history and culture, including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, prints, posters, sound recordings, and more.
LIFE Magazine Digital Archive provides full-text, full-color access to the magazine's issues from 1936 to 1972. Users can browse or text-search within issues.
LIFE Magazine Photo Archive makes available millions of photographs, including unpublished ones, from the magazine's archives, spanning the 18th to the 21st centuries. Users can keyword search or browse images by decade and suggested subjects.
The Digital Loeb Classical Library offers access to hundreds of volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts, allowing users to browse, search, bookmark, annotate, and share content. This virtual library runs the gamut of classical literature, including epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, philosophy, and oratory; medical and mathematical works; and more.
Luna Commons hosts a number of freely available collections (permissions-based collections require a subscription, which BGC does not have) from participating institutions. These include the Catena Collection, the Farber Gravestone Collection, and Cornell’s Political Americana Collection. The searching and viewing interface is elegant and the metadata and image quality is excellent across all collections.
The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is comprised of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
MetPublications provides access to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's digitized publications, including books, exhibition catalogues, guides Bulletins, and Journals, and more.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's online database offers hundreds of thousands of images from their extensive collections, representing all periods, cultures, and manners of human creative production.
The MoMA Exhibition History Digital Archive allows users to explore material related to exhibitions, film series, and performance programs from the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 from 1929 to the present, including installation images and related publications.
The Morgan Library & Museum offers images of many of its collection items, including manuscripts, early printed books and bindings, ancient Western Asian seals and tablets, photography, archives, and more.
The Museum of Modern Art provides a searchable and browsable image database of many items in its collections.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections makes available hundreds of thousands of items digitized from the NYPL's collections, including prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Proquest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times offers full access to the New York Times from 1851 to the present, with searchable text and full-page views.
Newspaper Source offers cover-to-cover full-text access to hundreds of US and international newspapers, as well as television and radio news transcripts.
NYARC Discovery allows users to search the collections of the New York Art Resources Consortium, which consists of the libraries and archives of The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and MoMA.
The New York City Archaeological Repository houses hundreds of thousands of artifacts from sites throughout the city; many of the collections have been integrated into the database and can be searched and accessed digitally. Records include excavation site and project descriptions as well as images of each artifact.
Oxford Art Online provides access to several online art reference works: Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms
An illustrated collection of more than 57,000 specially written biographies of noteworthy people from around the world in any walk of life who were connected with the British Isles and British history worldwide.
Patrologia Latina is a complete electronic version of Jacques-Paul Migne's publication, which comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.
Project MUSE provides access to scholarly journals and ebooks in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is the database of record for graduate research, and the official dissertations repository for the Library of Congress. It includes work by authors from international graduate schools and universities, dating from the 1850s to the present. Abstracts are included for those completed later than 1988. BGC provides access to the Humanities and Social Sciences Collection.
EBSCO's Religion and Philosophy Collection is a full-text database for theology and philosophy research, covering such topics as world religions, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, and the history of philosophy.
ScienceDirect offers full-text access to peer-reviewed articles and book chapters related to the sciences, technology, and medicine.
SCIPIO provides bibliographic information on auction catalogues from major North American and European auction houses as well as notable private sales, and indicates which libraries hold the catalogues.
Provides bibliographic information and current pricing structures for popular serials. It contains nearly 212,000 U.S. and international titles, including newspapers.
The Smithsonian Archives Image Gallery offers a searchable and browsable digital database of the vast holdings of the Smithsonian's sub-institutions, including the National Museum of the American Indian, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and National Anthropological Archives.
The Times Digital Archive is a full-text digital facsimile of more than 200 years of The Times (London), from 1785 to the present. This historical newspaper archive allows users to search millions of articles, supporting research across multiple disciplines and areas of interest, including business, humanities, political science, and philosophy.
The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) provides a substantial body of terms for the subject, genre and format indexing of pictorial materials. Developed to support the cataloging and retrieval needs of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, it is made publicly available in the hope that it will promote standardization in image cataloging. When searching TGM users can link to related images from the Library's Prints and Photographs catalog.
The Victoria and Albert Museum offers a searchable and browsable image database of many items in its collections dedicated to decorative arts and material culture.
The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) makes available thousands of images from hundreds of art and design collections across the UK. The images cover a broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media.
Vogue Archive offers a complete, searchable digital archive of Amerian Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color images.
The William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive documents the lives and works of 19th-century Texas artisans and artists through a range of primary and secondary source materials, such as census and city directory records, newspaper articles and advertisements, ephemera, and more.
Women's Wear Daily Archive provides full-text access to the journal's issues from its launch in 1910 to the present (with a 6-month embargo on new issues). Pages, articles, advertisements, and covers have been included, with searchable text and indexing.
The World Digital Library is an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the Library of Congress that brings together historically significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including rare books, manuscripts, maps, prints, photographs, films, recordings, and more.
WorldCat is a global union catalog that allows users to search for books, periodicals, articles, and more at libraries and other institutions all over the world.
WorthPoint is a resource for researching, valuing, and preserving antiques, art, and collectibles. Its offerings include an auction price guide, a gallery of makers' marks, and a digital library covering a wide range of collecting topics. Note: A username and password are required for access; please contact library staff for log-in information.
Yale Digital Collections provides access to millions of digitized materials, including archives, manuscripts, printed books, maps, ephemera, prints and drawings, and photographic material. The collecitons represented span Yale's various repositories, such as the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Yale Divinity Library, the Medical Historical Library, the Lillian Goldman Law Library, the Gilmore Music Library, and more.