LIBRARY CATALOGS

Smithsonian Institution Libraries Catalog (SIRIS)
Search the holdings of the National Museum of African Art.

RLIN Eureka
Union catalog of over 40 million titles owned by members of the Research Library Group, a consortia of major research institutions which includes Rutgers and Princeton. (Rutgers-restricted Access)

Worldcat
Union catalog of over 46 million titles owned by libraries that participate in/contribute to OCLC. Includes the holdings of many New Jersey academic, public, and special libraries. (Rutgers-restricted Access)

INDEXES

African Studies
Search across 17 databases providing access to multi-disciplinary information on Africa. Over 634,000 indexed references to all aspects of African studies. (Rutgers-restricted Access)

Anthropological Literature
Index to articles and essays in anthropology and related disciplines. 1984- (Rutgers-related Access)

Art Abstracts
Index to more than 285 art periodicals. In addition to articles, indexes photographs of works of art published in the indexed journals. 1983- (Rutgers-restricted Access)

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
Index to over 1,000 periodicals dealing with architecture and related disciplines. 1977- (Rutgers-restricted Access)

Bibliography of Africana Periodical Literature Database
Index to over 40,000 articles from over 325 journals that specialize in African Studies or consistently cover the African continent. Journals indexed in their entirety.

Bibliography of the History of Art
Index to more than 2,500 art-related periodicals, plus books, conference proceedings, exhibition catalogs, and dissertations. 1973- (Rutgers-restricted Access)

ART AND CULTURE

Akan Cultural Symbols Project Online
"The focus of this project is to utilize the pictograms and ideograms encoded in the arts of the Akan to decode some aspects of the history, beliefs, social organizations, social relations, and other ideas of the Akan of Ghana." Includes sections on symbols relating to Akan systems of economics, knowledge, cosmology, and political beliefs.

Art and Oracle: African Art and Rituals of Divination
Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit(April 25 to July 30, 2000) of "African artifacts created to communicate with ancestors, spirits, and gods in order to obtain insight into human quandaries."

Meanings of Symbols in Adinkra Cloth
"80 most commonly used symbols, their names, sources of derivation, their literal translations and their symbolic meanings."

African Traditional Religion
Chidi Denis Isizoh's outstanding collection of scholarly links to information relating to traditional African religions. Includes an extensive Bibliography on African Traditional Religion.

SCUPTURE

African Sculpture
Images from the University of Pennsylvania Musuem.

Arnaut, Karel. "Tradition as object of derision and desire: the Bedu masquerade of north-eastern Côte d'Ivoire."
From: K. Arnaut (ed.) RE-VISIONS: New perspectives on the African collections of the Horniman Museum, 2000. Download. Will open as a text file.

Artistry of African Mask
Exhibit from the virtual Nok Museum of African Arts. 20 masks from different African cultures.

Cameroon: Mask and Statues
From the University of Yaounde.

Mask Categories
From chokwe.com- Chokwe, Lwena/Luvale, Lunda and Related Peoples of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia.

POTTERY

African Pottery Forming and Firing Techniques: A Virtual Slide Show
By Univeristy of Iowa professor Christopher Roy.

The Earth Transformed: Ceramic Arts of Africa
From the Virtual Research Center for African Ceramics at the University of Iowa. Offers a variety of resources including archives of images and full-text publications, links to articles dealing with African ceramics, and an extensive bibliography on African ceramic arts.

TEXTILES AND CLOTHING

Caruso, Joseph S. The Art of Kuba Weaving: Suggested Reading
February 1998.

Davison, Patricia. Baule Cloth From the Ivory Coast
Sagittarius 2(1), 1987.

Hats Off! A Salute to African Headwear
An 1999 online exhibit from the National Museum of African Art.

Kente Cloth: A Selected Bibliography
Compiled by Ruth A. Hodges. February 1994.

Social Fabric: Exploring the Kate Peck Kent Collection of West African Textiles
Sections on Adinkra, Adire, and Strip Weaving, with links to examples in the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology collection. Links to other sites with information on African textiles.

Svenson, Ann E. "Kuba Textiles: An Introduction"
WAAC Newsletter 8(1), January 1986, 2-5.

BEADWORK

Eloquent Elegance: Beadwork in the ZULU cultural tradition
Hilgard S. Schoeman. Includes a section on The Zulu Beadwork Language.

Hooper, Lindsay. The Art of Ndebele Beadwork
Sagittarius 3(4), December 1988.

IMAGES

AMICO Library: The Art Museum Image Consortium
Database of over 82,000 digitilized images of works of art. (Rutgers-restricted Access)

Africa.photo.com
Large, searchable database of photographs from 1870 to the present.

African Art Musuem
Virtual gallery of over 1000 objects from over 100 ethnic groups. Organized by tribal groups.

The Baobab Project: Sources and Studies in African Visual Culture
This project of the Harvard University Department of Fine Arts focuses on "why certain cultures, places and periods have encouraged creativity and innovation in the arts." Includes a relational Imagebase of over 17,000 images, and an Ethnographic Database with over 100 fields of data for over 900 African cultures.

Catalog of the Stanley Collection of African Art
University of Iowa Museum of Art collection. Allows you to search by group, by country, by material, by function, etc. Part of the Art and Life in Africa Online (ALA) project.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco ImageBase
Search a database of 75,000 objects in the collections of the Legion of Honor and DeYoung museums of San Francisco.

G.I. Jones Photographic Archive of Southeastern Nigerian Art and Culture
Photographs taken in the 1930s depicting the arts and cultures of southeastern Nigeria, primarily from the Igbo-speaking regions. Includes photographs of Ekpe Masquerades.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Fifty highlights from the collection are presented online.

ICOM STANDARDS

International Council of Museums. Handbook of Standards: Documenting African Collections
Standards for documenting objects in museum collections. Defines the minimal information needed to permit the identification of each object or specimen. In English or French.

WEB GUIDES

African Art on the Internet
Extensive list of annotated links. Part of the excellent Africa: South of the Sahara site.

The Arts of Africa
From Professor Chris Witcombe, Sweet Briar College.

African Studies: Art and Architecture
Annotated guide from the Columbia University Libraries.

---

Corrections?
Natalie Borisovets (natalieb@andromeda.rutgers.edu)
John Cotton Dana Library
Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey
January 27, 2002