The ARLIS/NA Texas-Mexico Chapter meeting began Friday, October 20 with a presentation from Thomson-Gale representative LuAnn Harrison, who presented a few of their databases including Eighteenth-century Collections Online, Sabin America, 1500-1926, and Corbis Images for Education. Our chapter was interested in ways that these databases would be beneficial to the patrons we serve.
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, is based on Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotecha Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From Its Discovery to the Present Time. The database contains books, pamphlets, and serials from a variety of genres including memoirs, travelogues, and sermons all predominantly in English. Currently a user can search the full-text of 27,459 titles, but this number will keep growing as they add new titles. Based on the ESTC (English Short Title Catalog), Eighteenth-century Collections Online allows full-text searching of over 138,000 titles which cover the American and French revolutions and the industrial revolution. As far as being beneficial to the art community, these databases may contain materials with biographical information on artists or materials that reference works of art in collections or exhibition catalogues, which could prove valuable for provenance research.
The third Thomson-Gale database that our chapter looked at was Corbis Images for Education. The Corbis resource is somewhat similar to ARTstor, an image database with downloadable images and brief information about the image. The major difference is that Corbis does not currently contain nearly as many fine art images as ARTstor. Corbis plans to add more fine art images in the future but for now, with its large collection of predominantly historical photographs, it is more comparable to the database AP Photo Archive.