BHA (Bibliography of the History of Art) is a composite of three related databases. It includes the Bibliography of the History of Art, RILA (International Repertory of the Literature of Art), and RAA (Repertoire d’Art et d’Archeologie).
RAA was founded in 1910 and became a fully automated database in 1973. RILA began regular publication in 1973 and merged with RAA following the appearance of its 15th volume in 1989. The documentation claims that the CD‐ROM version of the BHA database contains all RILA records published between 1975 and 1989 and all RAA records published between 1973 and 1989, when RAA was merged with RILA to become BHA. However, browsing the publication year index reveals very few records with publication dates prior to 1980.
BHA is a bilingual bibliographic database on the history of postclassical Western art. It began publication in 1991 as a result of the merger of the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA) and Repertoire d’Art et d’Archeologie (RAA). The installation software lets you install all three databases or just selected ones and the documentation says that researchers can search individual databases or all of them at once. However, we could only search BHA. Trying to search the others produced an error message “Could not find database=RILA.CFG (or RAA.CFG) on path E:\.” Nor could we find corresponding data files on the CD.
The CD runs under Windows 3.X and Windows 95 and requires a minimum of a 386 PC with 4 MB of RAM (486 PC with SVGA color display recommended), VGA display, mouse, and 6 MB of hard disk space; but, if you don’t install the Help files, it only requires a little over 2 MB of hard disk space. The help files remain accessible from the CD and take only a few seconds longer to access.
Researchers can begin keying terms right from the main screen. The software automatically reformats them into proper syntax. The search defaults to the Basic Index; but researchers can select any of the 24 indexes that include: Title, author, keyword in author, author of review, author of work reviewed, corporate author, keyword in corporate author, keyword in subject, subjects, subject strings, iconography, chronology (by year range or centuries), minor subjects, document type, journal or keyword in journal, ISSN, ISBN, publisher/place of publication, publication year, language, or summary language.
The database supports the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT (AND is the default; but one can change that to OR), wild cards (? and *), and relational operators < (before), > (after), <= (before or equal to), >= (after or equal to), and THRU (a range with beginning and ending terms). There is no limit to the number of search terms that researchers can combine. It may occur that someone may want to check the search command that produced a set of results. Clicking the right mouse button on the display will do just that.
Wild card searches are particularly powerful. Unlike most other databases which only accommodate terminal truncation, BHA supports initial and internal truncation. For example, “mic*o” will retrieve Michelangelo, Michelozzo, Micheletto, Michico, micro, microcosmo, etc.
Most of the articles in the database were written in English, French, Italian, and German; but the database is international in scope. One will find articles written in a wide variety of languages, including Afrikaans, Eskimo, Esperanto, Frisian, Faroese, Icelandic, and Macedonian. Abstracts are in English or French and there are full subject indexes in both languages. Users can also select either language for the operating language and may change language at any time.
Search terms appear in blue text rather than black. Cross references in the Subjects index appear as underlined green text. Clicking on it will jump to the main entry. Researchers can display results in brief, full, and custom modes and use the buttons on the button bar to control the display. Custom display lets them choose which fields to add or exclude from the display. They can also choose to use a custom display as the default for any subsequent searches. In addition, users can choose to display all fields (every field in the database in both French and English). They can go to the next or previous record or key in a particular record number to go directly to it. One can mark or unmark records for printing, exporting, or creating record sets which can be used for subsequent searches.
Records display in alphabetical order by title. Users can opt to sort them by different criteria and specify the priority of each criterion. They can export current or marked records or a range of records. Records are exported in the mode in which they are currently displayed in tab‐delimited ASCII ‐ Latin 1 (ISO 8859‐1) format and can be read by any word processing software.
BHA: Bibliography of the History of Art comes with a thesaurus of subject headings in both French and English. Headings include biblical, mythological, and fictional names. Each heading lists the translation, broader, narrower, related and Used for terms. All terms have also been translated into the reciprocal language. A few terms lack an equivalent; so they remain in the original language. When a term has more than one equivalent, it is followed by an explanation in parentheses. Terms that have more than one equivalent have glosses in square brackets, e.g. Reconstruction [hypothetical], Reconstruction [reassembly], Reconstruction [rebuilding]. These terms are to be searched using only the basic term as the gloss does not appear in the bibliographic record.
BHA, together with its predecessors, has become one of the standard sources for bibliographical information in art history. It is highly regarded and international in scope. The CD‐ROM version makes it easier and quicker to use than its print counterparts. Few libraries will have all the print volumes covered by this disc.
The user interface is clear, uncluttered, and easy to use. The search engine is a model for other bibliographic databases. It is quick, efficient, and supports more truncation methods than its competitors. Highly recommended.
