Image Searching

Find images in the library collection

To find images in books from the Booth Library collection, search the EIU Online Catalog.

• The physical description in the catalog record will note if a book has illustrations.

See the highlighted Format field in the description below from the book _Renoir : his life, art and letters_

• You can also try searching for your subject along with the term "pictorial works." (This term is applied to books when content is 50% or more pictorial, as opposed to textual.)
  For example, this search: renaissance "pictorial works" returns a book titled: The Renaissance: maker of modern man You can see in the screenshot below that "pictorial works" is one of the subject headings thereby ensuring that the work is at least 50% illustrations.  
  
• ​Use "portraits" to search for images of people, such as: expressionism portraits 

To find reproductions of a particular work of art:

In the library catalog, search for the artist's name. Once you have a book about the artist in hand, consult the index or list of illustrations (if available) to find out if/where the artwork is pictured within that book.

For a more comprehensive search, look for books on art by time period or century, region or culture, medium, movement, subject, and/or institution housing the work. 

Searching by the title of the artwork may be successful if it's a well-known work (or if it happens to be mentioned in a table of contents), but most individual artworks do not have entire books written about them. Instead, try searching in library research databases for an article on the artwork, since articles tend to focus on narrower topics.

When searching in library databases, look for search options that will help to limit the results to images.

For example, in Art Abstracts you can to limit your search by document type to art reproduction, cover art, or image.

Humanities International Complete offers even more options, listing nearly 40 visual document types.

Academic Search Complete allows you to select one or more of 7 image quick-view types.

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Scanning equipment and Adobe Creative Cloud is available at the media workstations in the northwest corner of the 4000 Level (4th floor).

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Beyond using keywords (natural language, i.e., how people speak), searching with subject terms can be helpful in discovering additional resources. See selected examples below (links go to search results so you can compare the difference.)

Library of Congress Classification for Fine Arts

LCC organizes art by medium, then by period or region. Individual artists are classed under country of origin, then alphabetically by name. The call numbers for many art resources begin with class N or its subclasses: