The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) conducts surveys of academic libraries on a wide variety of topics. These SPEC Kits combine the survey results and documentation from ARL member institutions to guide libraries as they address the ever-changing challenges facing libraries. These guides help libraries learn about current practice in research libraries, implement new practices and technologies, manage change, and improve performance.
Find Databases
Art and Architecture Archive is a major research resource comprising the digitized backfiles of many of the foremost art and architecture magazines of the twentieth century. Each journal/magazine issue is scanned from cover to cover in high resolution color and has a fully searchable text.
The A&A ePortal is an eBook resource that features important works of scholarship in the history of art, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and design. The site includes many out-of-print titles, key backlist, and recent releases from some of the world’s finest academic and museum publishers.
Launched in May 2014, the Art Discovery Group Catalogue (ADGC) offers an art-focused research experience within the OCLC WorldCat environment. Researchers may search within this specialized subset of Worldcat data to hone in on a vast trove of art-historical literature held in an ever-increasing number of the world’s finest art libraries. These art library records are searchable alongside additional content from a multitude of sources in the large metadata pool derived from thousands of commercial and freely-accessible collections, portals and repositories provided by OCLC as the WorldCat Central Index.
Art Index Retrospective: 1929 -1984 provides users access to over half a century of art literature covering fine, decorative, and commercial art. Content includes high-quality indexing of nearly 600 publications, many of which are peer-reviewed, and citations of over 25,000 book reviews.
A comprehensive survey of current publications in the fields of visual and applied arts. This collection includes the specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design and Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts) and the International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on Western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals, Arts and Humanities Full Text.
ArtBabble is a collection of high quality videos from numerous museums and libraries (primarily US) including the Indianapolis Museum of Art (the originator), LACMA, the Getty, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and New York Public Library.
Provides access to abstracts of journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogs, dissertations, and exhibition reviews.
Content of this database is from a large nationwide project designed to recover and preserve Latino-Hispanic writings and culture from all regions of the United States and dating from the colonial period to 1960. 80% of the items are in Spanish and 20% in English. Series 1 contains thousands of articles, political and religious pamphlets,and ebooks. Searchable in Spanish and English.
Content of this database is from a large nationwide project designed to recover and preserve Latino-Hispanic writings and culture from all regions of the United States and dating from the colonial period to 1960. 80% of the items are in Spanish and 20% in English. Series 2 contains thousands of pages of electronic versions of rare books, manuscripts, historical newspapers and periodicals. Searchable in Spanish and English.
A compendium of French texts, mostly from the Renaissance-20th century.
Contains the table of contents pages and holdings information from more than 13,000 journals in science, technology, medicine, social science, business, the humanities, and popular culture. Although most of the journals are published in English, journals in other languages are also included. Updated daily.
The Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It indexes 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, as well as covering individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals.
This database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies.
The Arts Premium Collection provides cross-searchable access to thousands of journal titles, ensuring deep searches of extensive international collections in specialist subject areas not covered in more general databases
Nonprofit digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.
Started in August 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles in the areas of physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics.
"Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search for Library" is the largest newspaper article database in Japan, permitting searches of 16 million articles and advertisements from more than 140 years of the newspaper, from its first edition in 1879 to today. Access to the database is limited to 8 users shared among the consortium of currently ten (10) participating institutions.
ASCE Research Digital Library is a comprehensive online tool for locating articles across all disciplines of civil engineering. It provides unprecedented access to more than 40,000 full-text papers, published proceedings, e-books and standards.
The ASFA database provides citations and abstracts of the world's literature dealing with the science, technology and management of marine, freshwater and brackish water environments and organisms.
Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
Includes images from the Associated Press. Licensing allows for classroom use.
Resources related to publishing, copyright, open access, data management, and repositories. Includes tools and suggested readings.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, initiated in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, is compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the various dialects of Akkadian, the earliest known Semitic language that was recorded on cuneiform texts that date from c. 2400 B.C. to A.D. 100 which were recovered from archaeological excavations of ancient Near Eastern sites.
The ASTM Standards and Engineering Digital Library is a vast collection of industry-leading standards and technical engineering information.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials combines the premier index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all fields of religion with ATLA's online collection of major religion and theology journals.
The Audio Drama Collection delivers more than three hundred important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation's premiere radio theatre company.
Australasian Literature: Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands Australasian Literature brings together creative works from throughout Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. 1930-present.
This database provides ongoing full-text academic journals that are locally published by scholarly publishing organizations and educational institutions in Australia and New Zealand. Major subject areas of study are represented, including business, science, technology, engineering, social sciences, education, and humanities.
The Australian Education Index is a comprehensive collection of educational research documents relating to educational trends, policy, and practices. The database is produced by the Cunningham Library at the Australian Council for Educational Research and is Australia's largest source of education information. Coverage includes trends and practices in teaching, learning and educational management.
The Avery Index is the only comprehensive American index to the literature of architecture and architectural design.
A collection of contemporary music scores presented in a virtual booklet format allowing you to read music while you listen.
A comprehensive public reference library containing a searchable database of reference, verse, and classic literature.
The database provides access to information about Basque topics written or produced after 1994.
Collection of stereoscopic anatomy images from the Lane Library at Stanford. Use and copyright discussed on home page of Bassett collection.
This site supplies information on the history, economy, and politics of countries and territories.
Archive includes transcripts of global radio and television broadcasts, telegraph, and news sources translated into English and summarized by the BBC Monitoring Service.
BCC Research provides objective, unbiased measurement and assessment of market opportunities with detailed market research reports.
The Begell Digital Library Collection is a consolidated and peer-reviewed collection of leading academic, research, and applied work in the fields of engineering and biomedical sciences.
Alexander Street's Behavioral and Mental Health Online provides a comprehensive, rich, and diverse collection of video and text . The collection includes clinical mental health demonstrations, actual therapy sessions, compelling documentaries on the human condition, psychotherapy transcripts, as well client narratives and reference works.
Live broadcasts, archived performances since 1966, documentaries, and interviews accessible in HD across multiple devices. (Requires creation of individual account within USC’s subscription).
Bertolt Brecht's work has always provoked heated discussion, though today he is viewed as principally a classicist and a rationalist.
This database indexes over 370 international humanities journals and weekly magazines published in the UK and other English speaking countries, as well as newspapers published in the UK. Coverage includes 1962 to current.
20 different versions of the English Bible from the tenth to the twentieth century, including 12 full Bibles, 5 New Testament texts, 2 versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah and the New Testament.
This site provides an full-text online archive of past issues of the journal Biblical Archaeology Review (1975 to present), Bible Review (1985 to 2005 complete) and Archaeology Odyssey (1998 to 2006 complete), Special Collections assembles articles from BAR on each of several topics (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls, Temple Mount).
Bibliographic database of Spanish literature.
Bibliografía de la Literatura Española is a comprehensive bibliography of all documentation related to Literature in Spanish published in any language. It covers monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, bibliographies, congress proceedings, and other miscellaneous material.
Bibliographie de Civilisation Medievale (BCM) is a bibliography of books that can be searched together with or separately from the IMB (Brepols International Directory of Medievalists.
Recognized as one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship, the Bibliography of American Literature describes in exhaustive detail the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930.
The Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains over 737,175 records (as of July 9, 2009) 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.