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Library Research Materials for PhDs activity 3:
Major Resources in the Arts Administration Field

Here are some points to consider when thinking through the thought experiments in section two:

1. To find out if a book about K12 arts education contained any information on the Common Core, you might look at its table of contents, or in an index included at the back of the book. How would you find out if a particular periodical, such as the International Journal of Arts Management, had ever published an article about the Common Core?

Here, you would want to find a database product that indexes the International Journal of Arts Management (such as Art Index) and use it to search the whole run of the journal for key terms like “education” and “Common Core”.

The concept of “indexing” a periodical run is akin to the index for a book: someone—such as a professional indexer or bibliographer, or, increasingly, a machine—identifies the key terms for every single article published in every issue of that periodical. Periodicals indexers’ key terms include authors’ names, article titles, publication dates, and—crucially—subject keywords. Indexers enter the terms into their companies’ searchable database products. These research databases are most often provided online and sold via subscription to research libraries, who in turn provide access to the researchers associated with the library institution.

2. If you were writing a research paper on the Kentucky non-profit arts organization LexArts, how would you begin to look for their financial information, such as executive salaries or IRS forms?

Information like this is one of the many things provided by GuideStar, a database of information on non-profit organizations.