finding images

Are you looking for images of artwork in a certain style or time period, but keep retrieving the same artists over and over? Want to exclude some of the more well-known artists in order to delve more deeply into a topic? Excluding certain words and phrases when searching in databases is often essential. No matter the scenario, the following strategies in LUNA and ARTstor can help you find what you’re looking for.

Excluding Terms in LUNA Searches

In LUNA, Boolean operators don’t work the way you might expect. The “NOT” operator is absent from the advanced search, and it doesn’t work quite right in a keyword search, either. But you can still find what you’re looking for via the following steps:

Use a dash (-) to exclude a term from an existing search result. If you want to exclude a phrase, you must put a dash in front of every word.
Do not use quotation marks.
Example search: house -Frank -Lloyd -Wright (to find houses designed by architects other than Frank Lloyd Wright).
As always, these terms entered in the keyword search box will only search the collection you have currently selected. To select a new collection, go to “Collections” in the menu bar and select from the list at left.

Excluding Terms in ARTstor Searches

ARTstor allows you to exclude words and phrases using the Boolean operator NOT. This function works best when used in the Advanced Search.
To exclude certain words from an advanced search, select “NOT” from the drop-down menu at left. If you are excluding a phrase, be sure to use quotation marks.
Example search: house NOT “frank lloyd wright” (in creator field)

For more LUNA tutorials, click here. For more ARTstor tutorials, click here. Questions? Feel free to contact us!

Are you looking for images for a class presentation or paper? The VRC is here to help!

LUNA is the Department of Art History’s teaching resource of more than 165,000 digital images designed for use in conjunction with current classes. To access this database, click here. You will be prompted to login with a Cnet ID and password.

Next, you can browse the Art History Department Image Collection by clicking the center link.

Narrow your results using the What, Where, Who and When facets on the left.

Keyword search is at upper right. To do an advanced search, click the link under the keyword search box.

Limit your search to the Art History Department Image Collection, and then search any of the fields in the drop-down menu. Limiting to this collection allows searching of more specific fields, though you may find searching multiple collections useful as well.

Now that you’ve found some relevant images, you may want to return to them later. Use the Share This function to email yourself a link to your search results, or create a media group to access at a later time.

To learn more about searching for images in LUNA, please feel free to contact the VRC to schedule an appointment. We provide image searching orientation for individuals and small groups. Additional VRC-created LUNA tutorials and LUNA-provided flash tutorials are also available.