Art and Architecture: Primary Sources

Primary Sources are original materials that have not been edited, evaluated, or altered by a second party.

Examples include letters, diaries, interviews, speeches, audio and video recordings, statistics, legal or organizational records, and arifacts (including works of art).

• Architecture and Design Collection
  • Repository of architectural records

• Chicano Visual Arts Digital Image Collection
  • Archival images in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA)

• UCSB Department of Special Research Collections

• Archives of American Art oral history interviews

• Beazley Archive
  • Collection of casts and photographs of Classical Greek and Roman Art from the University of Oxford

• Bücher zur Architektur und Gartenkunst
  • Free resource- from the University of Heidelberg
  • Over 80 rare books, among them, Palladio, Vitruvius, Vignola, Serlio, Blondel, and Fischer von Erlach-- from the 15th to the 19th century covering architecture and landscape architecture

• Calisphere
  • More than 150,000 items- including photographs, documents from libraries and museums in the UC and other institutions in California

• Chicago Architects Oral History Project
  • Free resource from the Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson & Burnham Archives
     
• European Archive
  • Digital library of cultural artifacts
• Getty Research Portal
  • Comprised of digitized art history texts in the public domain. Includes rare books, literature, etc.

• Guggenheim Publications
  • Digitized exhibition catalogs from the Guggenheim Museum, including essays from 1937 to the present

• Library of Congress' Digital Collections
   
• Medici Archive Project
  • Online database of the Medici Granducal Archive (1573-1743)
• OAIster
  • Free resource. Included are archival resources, digitized books and articles, born digital texts, audio files, images, movies, and data sets
• Online Archive of California
  • Free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections by more than 150 institutions
  • Includes libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California
  • Maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses

• Smithsonian Institution Research Information System
  • Search the archival, manuscript, and photographic collections
  • Provides access to the Smithsonian American Art Museum inventories and pre-1877 art exhibition catalogues index