Everything you wanted to know about art journals

What is a journal?

A journal is one of the more straightforward types of documents in the art library field. A journal in this instance is different from the personal form of a journal like that of a diary. While journals are focused more on the academic and scholarly communities, they can be read by a wide audience providing access to the texts.

A few things to be aware of:

• Traditional academic and scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, which means the articles contained within are evaluated by an editorial board and subject experts before being published.

• Journals are published on a continual basis, meaning it is a serial. Serials can also include magazines, newspapers, and other trade publications that are issued periodically. (Hence where the term periodical comes from)

• Journals can contain a mixture of research or survey articles as well as reviews, which generally review other published works (like books) in the same subject area.

• Some journals you need to pay for access to, whether it's for a single article (pay-per-view) or as a collective whole. Most libraries have access to journals via a subscription basis or as part of a larger database of resources. Open Access journals are made freely available online.

So who uses journals?

Journals are perhaps the most widely used and accessible piece of art and art historical literature and run the gamut of being used by students, scholars, researchers, curators, art professionals, museum professionals, artists, teachers, professors, hobbyists, and anyone interested in the subject field. Since art journals range from the broad to specific in scope and subject, they are useful for novices and experts alike. 

Why are journals important?

Journals are the professional literature written by field experts. They also have the added benefit of being widely read demographically through the field, from new students through aged professionals. Journals allow for both in-depth research on a given topic as well as broad-based commentary. They can cover every aspect of a given subject matter, and continually re-examining it through different lenses. Journals allow us an insight not only into the art & architecture topics discussed in the articles themselves, but also the historiography of it - essentially how art & architecture have been studied over time. Through journals, we can observe how works of art, artists, and period of art have been interpreted, understood, and taught. A single article, therefore can be examined both for it's content and it's place contextually in the literature.

Important issues:

• Cost
• The most major issue currently at hand regarding periodicals is their cost. Some journals can cost upwards of $10,000 a year and even if budgets across every institution regardless of size or type haven't become progressively tighter, journals can be prohibitively expensive. For smaller libraries especially, the decisions about where money should go are not easy ones to make. But in order to be caught up in the current literature, journals are a difficult necessity to contend with. There are over 600 resources covered in Art Full Text, a large database service. But not all of them are indexed and abstracted in their entirety, and they are divided into core and priority levels. Magazines, trade publications, and academic journals are included. Within a single large database, however, not all of them are useful in certain contexts to libraries.

•  Open Access
• Open Access is an area that has gained considerable steam in the past few years. As early as 2003 and 2004, articles were discussing the possibilities that growing Open Access could provide. However, there are very few Open Access journals in the arts and humanities, most are reserved for the hard sciences. This is perhaps due to the nature of scientific research. Open Access offers no incentives for a publisher to invest in making a book about something that's already been made free on the internet. So while there are over a hundred art and architecture Open Access journals, most are published languages other than English and not on contemporary subjects.

•  Other Publications
• There are, however, other art publications and documents available online, usually provided a given institution. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched MetPublications in 2012, which provides access to over 800 titles of publications, books and journals, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin and Metropolitan Museum Journal.

•  Digital vs Print
• Another major issue to contend with is choosing between digital and print journals. With the rising cost of subscriptions, where is the decision-line made? More journals are being made available online, yes, but it doesn't necessarily include every back issue or full-text. The very idea of ownership is in flux in the digital world. Do libraries pay for access to information or do they pay to own it? Print journals still offer a level of control that is lacking in the online publishing world. We are now in a transitional era, which is both exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.

References

Suber, Peter. "Removing the barriers to research: an introduction to open access for librarians." College & Research Libraries News 64 (2003).

Hanson, Michael, and Terese Heidenwolf. "Making the right choices Pay-per-view use data and selection decisions." College & Research Libraries News 71.11 (2010): 586-588.

Stam, Deirdre Corcoran. "How art historians look for information." Art Documentation 3.4 (1984): 117-119.

de Luise, Alexandra. "Full Text or Not? All Illustrations or Not?." Art Documentation 22.2 (2003): 20-25.

Veeder, Hillary B. "A Comparison of EBSCO's" Art & Architecture Complete" and HW Wilson's" Art Full-Text" Databases." Art Documentation (2011): 54-68.