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E-Books for Visual Arts: PRINT vs DIGITAL

Guide to the many E-Book resources available for art and architecture.

Why You Need to Come to Haas Arts Library

The vast majority of art and architecture materials are not full-text-accessible in electronic format. This means you will need to come to the library to access most items in print. The following outlines several reasons for this.

Why Print Rules in the Arts:

Less than 10% of all research materials for art and architecture that contain images are available in e-book form. The Haas Arts Library owns approximately 500,000 printed books and journals on Yale's campus. Sterling Memorial Library, the Bass Library, The Divinity Library and the Medical Library also have some art books in their collections. This gives you an idea how little of art and architectual scholarship is digitized, as Yale has an extremely respectable print collection of art books, but not the largest in the United States or the world.

A student cannot depend ONLY on digitized journal articles and eBooks to write a term paper, thesis or dissertation in the disciplines of art and architecture. The digitized articles and books that do exist cover a random range of art subjects and most are out of copyright, meaning they were published before 1923.

Journals vs Books:

More art and architecture  journal articles are available digitally every year, however it is a very small quantity of the total number of articles available in print. In many cases, the article may be digitized, but the images will not be available.  Databases like JSTOR, Ebsco Academic Search (now includes former WilsonWeb Art Full-Text) provide some fully digitized articles, but using these resources alone is not enough to write a college-level or academic paper on a given topic in the arts.

The 2 Copyright Hurdles for Art Books: What kinds of permissions are needed to reproduce and/or digitize books and journals?

Copyright Permission: if the work is still in copyright and is not in the public domain, then permission to digitize or reproduce the text is required.

Use permission: For images, use permissions must be granted from institutions or persons authorized to furnish a reproduction image of the artwork desired for use in publication. When digitizing an existing book or journal containing images, each image must have use permission again for the new format.

Further Reading:
Bielstein, Susan M.  Permissions, a survival guide: blunt talk about art as intellectual property
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006 
Available as both print and e-book at Yale:  http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/9418414
All you need to know about use permissions for images.
 
Lewis, Jim. iPad, Meet Your Nemesis: Why art books won't become e-books any time soon.
Slate.com Posted Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010, at 11:51 AM ET
This article outlines the challenges of reproducing works of art in terms of quality of image and the technologies available to reproduce images. The quality and accuracy of a print reproduction is very different than what is possible and visible in an electronic format.

Arts Librarian

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Heather Gendron
Contact:
Director, Robert B. Haas Arts Library
Arts Library 112
203-432-2642