Library news for Artists

Selected issues from the online archive of the New Yorker are now freely available, including this interview with John Cage from November 1964.

The Modernist Journals Project is a joint digitisation project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa which aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The aim of the project is to produce digital editions of culturally significant magazines from the early 20th century and make them freely available via the website. Journals include Blast, Wyndham Lewis’ ‘quintessential modernist little magazine’, and its successor, The Tyro; Robert Graves’ The Owl; and influential literary magazine, The English Review.

There are a number of popular American magazines now available in full via Google Books. Subjects covered range from science and sport to music, lifestyle and current affairs. Also included is a complete archive of Life magazine.

Access to JSTOR from outside the UCL network is no longer available via Athens.  We have instead moved to a new login mechanism which will be in place for most resources from August 2009.  There are two options to access JSTOR off-site (please note that if you wish to login in to a personal account you have created on JSTOR, you must use the second option):

1.  Follow the link in the databases list (under “J” for JSTOR) or to individual journals from the ejournals list.  Enter your UCL userid and password when prompted.

2.  From the JSTOR homepage, click on Login at the top right of the screen (you might need to scroll across to find it.)  Scroll down to the bottom section.  Do not select the Athens login link.  Instead, in the section Access JSTOR through a participating institution, select UCL (University College London) from the list of institutions.  Enter your UCL userid and password when prompted.

The Library now has a subscription for African Arts magazine. Recent issues (2007-) can be accessed electronically via the MIT Press website and older issues (1967-2003) via JSTOR.

The Library now has access to British Periodicals Online, which provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images.

Among the periodicals included are titles founded, edited or regularly contributed to by a host of important figures – Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Ford Madox Ford, Jerome K. Jerome, Samuel Johnson,and W. M. Rossetti to name but a few.

A wide variety of different types of periodical are represented, including art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated magazines. The collection forms an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.

Jurn is a new Google ’custom search engine’ for searching the content of free, full-text, academic e-journals listed on the Intute Arts & Humanities website. Intute is an online service providing access to quality web resources, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists, and Jurn has been created by one of their contributors. The 1500+ journals mostly cover the areas of art, media, film, literature, cultural studies, plus cultural history and design, and they can be searched by keyword using Jurn.

Issue 1 of e-flux journal is now available online. Articles include The next Documenta shouldn’t be in Kassel by Dieter Lesage, and The boss: on the unresolved question of authority in Joseph Beuys’s oeuvre and public image by Jan Verwoert.

Issue 0, November 2008, is also available.

Papers of Surrealism is a web-based journal produced by the AHRB Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies at the University of Manchester. The journal publishes original scholarly articles, translations, interviews, book and exhibition reviews as well as news and commentary. There have been five issues, with articles covering special subjects such as ‘Photography & film’, ‘Body/identity’, and ‘Play and humour’. There are interviews with artists such as Mark Dion, Jake Chapman, and Susan Hiller.

Art & Research is an online journal published by Studio 55: Centre for Research in Fine Art Practice at Glasgow School of Art. The two issues so far have included interviews, essays, and audio, visual or text-based artworks. It also publishes interdisciplinary articles which relate fine art practice to philosophy, politics, law, medicine, science and the humanities.

Issue 1 incuded interviews with Simon Starling and Ross Sinclair, and transcripts of lectures by David Batchelor and Barry Schwabsky, while issue 2 includes an essay on appropriation in contemporary art by Jan Verwoert and work by Chad McCail and Dan Graham.