How To
There are a few ways to browse the Online Collection:
On the homepage, you can browse curated selections from our collection.
On the exhibitions page, you can browse information about our exhibitions, and view artworks from each exhibition.
On the people page, you can browse individuals and/or institutions related to objects in the collection, along with relevant biographies and objects.
On the thesaurus page, you can browse structured vocabularies to find records with specific keywords. You can also see these terms when viewing a search result in detail. Click on these terms to browse other records linked to this term.
Enter keywords or names in the search box (Quick Search) to find objects or other records in our collection. To search on specific criteria, you can use the advanced search to search within certain data fields. You can search using multiple criteria, such as the term "portrait" in the title + a date range of "1800-1900". If you are not getting any results with advanced search, try broadening your search by removing criteria.
- You can use an * (asterisk) as a wildcard in searches, to match partial terms (e.g. draw* will return results for draw, drawn, drawings, etc.)
- Use quotation marks to get more exact results - e.g. John Doe will return any results with John or Doe, but "John Doe" will return results with this exact phrase.
There are different types of search results, such as object records and people records. When there is more than one type of result, you can choose different types of records to view.
You can refine a result set by using filters to narrow down results. For example, you can filter to see only works that have images within any result set. You can also clear each filter to revert to a larger result set, or clear all filters to get to your original result set.
An image may be shown as not available if it is not yet available in our database, or if it cannot be displayed for copyright reasons.
The Thesaurus page allows you to browse the online collection through linked keywords. Objects in the collection are linked to terms from The Getty Vocabularies and other authorities, which contain structured terminology for art and archival collections.
To select a thesaurus, click the dropdown for more options. In the thesaurus tree view, you can expand or collapse levels by clicking the triangle symbol. Clicking on any term in the tree will show a preview of objects in the collection which are associated with the term. To view all objects with this term as a search result, click the "View all" button in the right panel.
You can also click on terms in the detail view, which will jump to the associated branch in the thesaurus and show you other objects with this term.