Artstor Digital Library: Find Content

Artstor allows you to search over 270 collections from the world's museums, archives, libraries, artists, and scholars all in one place. There are different ways you can search for content in Artstor:

• Browse by geography, classification, or collection
• Keyword and filtered search
• Advanced search

Search for a keyword such as “dress” or “bowl.”  You can then filter your results by geography, classification, and date--or search within your results for additional terms to further narrow your results.

Use advanced search when you know what you are looking for. Select one or several keywords, such as an artist’s name or a specific work, and choose which fields you would like to search (default is to search all fields).

If you are looking for works from a specific period and location, you can conduct an advanced search without keywords and limit by date, geography, and classification. For example, if you are looking for paintings from the Italian Renaissance, you could conduct the following search:

View descriptions of all Artstor’s collections at www.artstor.org/collections. 

Browsing is a great way to serendipitously discover images. If you are not sure what you are looking for you can browse images by:

• Geography: Images organized by the creator’s nationality such as Albania, China, or the United States. Note that geography for architectural works is based on the location of the work, not the creator’s nationality.
   
• Classification: Artstor categorizes images based on 16 different classifications: Architecture and City Planning; Decorative Arts, Utilitarian Objects and Interior Design; Drawings and Watercolors; Fashion, Costume and Jewelry; Film, Audio, Video and Digital Art; Garden and Landscape; Graphic Design and Illustration; Humanities and Social Sciences; Manuscripts and Manuscript Illuminations; Maps, Charts and Graphs; Paintings; Performing Arts (including Performance Art); Photographs; Prints; Science, Technology and Industry; and Sculpture and Installations. You can view all images in each classification, or use classification to narrow keywords searches.
   
• Collection: Browse all the images from a particular collection, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Panos Pictures, or the National Gallery of Art. You can search within a particular collection by opening the collection, entering a search term in the search bar, selecting “search within results,” and clicking search.