The print version of the Grove Dictionary of Art was published in 1996 and runs to 34 volumes, representing the work of more than 6,800 scholars from 120 countries. The online version was published in November 1998. It includes all 41,000 articles from the print version in a fully searchable database. There are over 12,000 links to important art images in galleries and museums around the world and 20,000 biographies of artists, patrons ,and others who have influenced art over the centuries. An alliance with Bridgeman Art Library now offers access to 30,000 searchable images, increasing to 100,000 by the end of 1999. New articles, updates, and new image links will be added on an on‐going basis.
The dictionary covers almost all forms of the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic and decorative arts, and photography, from prehistory to the 1990s. Only film is excluded. Geographically, the coverage includes Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and Europe. Influences on the production of art such as trade, geography, history, and politics are also fully addressed.
The home page for the site is simple and handsomely designed. It provides links to the major sections of the site as well as an online help facility. The sections are described in the following points:
Introduction ‐ a wide range of topics is treated including, for articles: rules for attribution of authorship, alphabetization of article headings, the approach taken in providing cross‐referencing, and, finally, the structure and scope of associated bibliographies.
Articles (A‐Z) ‐ this section is laid out alphabetically by article title. Once in the article section, one can move quickly through the article titles by specifying the first and then second letter of the title. For example, in searching for an article on Albrecht Durer one would select “D” and be put at the beginning of the articles starting with “D” and then specify “u”. By scrolling, one could move to where an article beginning with the word “Durer” would fall in the alphabetical listing. Each article title is a hypertext link; and retrieving the article itself is straightforward. When viewing a particular article there are buttons on the left side of the screen that allow one to see pop‐up windows with links to the various subsections of the article or to the associated images. The image links could be external to the “Dictionary of Art” Web site. For example, the article on Vasily Kandinsky has links to Web sites in Russia, Spain and France, among others. Articles routinely conclude with a selective bibliography on the person or subject.
Search ‐ the search facility is very nicely laid out. One can search for the author of an article or for terms that might occur in the heading or full text of an article. There is a clearly written, extensive series of help screens providing details on the various search protocols. The search language is useful but limited. For example there are no explicit Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). Search results are ranked by “relevance;” but the method for determining relevance is not stated clearly.
Index ‐ within the index, one can use the “go to” facility to look for an index heading beginning with a particular character string or search for all the index entries containing a string. The entries associated with a particular index entry are hypertext links.
Appendices ‐ these list ancillary material such as the abbreviations and full names of the museums, galleries, and other institutions that own or display art works or archival material cited in the dictionary. There is also a list of all periodical titles cited in an abbreviated form in article bibliographies. The list of contributors to the dictionary provides the name only. Apparently, no other information is given.
The overall look of the site is impressive, especially when using a good 17 inch monitor. The screen design is clean and simple. Frames are used; but the only apparent scrolling boxes occur on the right side of the screen. The technical requirements for viewing are a graphical browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 4 or above. The monitor must have a screen resolution of at least 800 × 600 pixels. The site was accessed at various times of the day and no difficulty was experienced in capturing text or images.
The print version of the Dictionary of Art has been widely praised for its comprehensiveness and quality. The online version presents that information in an attractive and very effective manner. On that basis, it can be highly recommended to serious students and scholars.
