Bloomsbury Visual Arts: Art, Race and Gender Collection

CONTENT Part of the Bloomsbury Visual Arts (BVA) collection of databases, the Art, Race and Gender Collection brings together a range of resources that go beyond the standard canon to explore the intersectionality of art. The collection includes bibliographic and encyclopedic texts, including publications from Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Bloomsbury Academic, I.B. Tauris, ABC-CLIO, Amsterdam University Press, and Taylor and Francis. Works in the collection highlight the contributions of women artists and artists of color and explore subjects such as feminism, femininity and masculinity, class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and more. Titles in the Bloomsbury Visual Arts collection are selected with the guidance of global experts in the field who are members of Bloomsbury’s library advisory board. At the time of this review, the Art, Race and Gender collection consists of 77 full-text monographs.

USABILITY Users can access resources in BVA’s Art, Race and Gender Collection by searching the collection, browsing a complete list of titles, or browsing chapters by topic. The collection’s homepage features a graphical menu that allows users to browse chapters on painting, the history of art, portraiture, women, criticism, photography, race and racism, body, and gender. Presented through attractive tiles on the homepage, these predetermined filters make it easy to navigate the collection and engage in discovery. Search options include basic and advanced search tools. Advanced search options include the ability to search across multiple fields and refine searches by title, author/editor/creator, presence of a summary or abstract, category, keywords, or identifier. Users can also limit by content type. These include article, bibliographic guide, book, book chapter, building, designer biography, dictionary, encyclopedia entry, encyclopedias and reference works, exhibition, image, lesson plan, museum collection, museum object. Users are able to further refine search results by access type, collection, period, place, theme, peoples, cultures and religions, and/or objects. Users can also search within a title. Titles in the collection are immediately accessible and can be read within a user’s browser; they are presented in HTML format rather than as PDFs. A hyperlinked table of contents is available for each title, making it easy to navigate within a text. Save, print, share, and citation tools are available, as well as links to related content and a history of recently viewed content. The collection is cross-searchable within the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub for institutions that subscribe to additional BVA collections.

PRICING The Art, Race and Gender collection is available for purchase via perpetual access or subscription, with pricing based on institutional category and full-time enrollment. Perpetual-access is $10,740, plus an annual content update hosting fee of $100, beginning one year after the initial purchase and covering access to updated articles. Annual subscription to the collection is $1,790. Consortia discounts may be available.

VERDICT BVA’s Art, Race and Gender Collection provides access to a niche selection of monographs with an intersectional approach to art studies. A valuable resource for institutions supporting research and scholarship in the areas of art, art history, women’s and gender studies, and visual culture.