Killing Two Birds with One Stone Statue

Over the weekend, I had a patron come to the Fine Arts reference desk who was doing research on the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece. She was looking for research articles about it and also wanted images to include in a class presentation. I knew just the resource she should use, JSTOR*, because she could do one search and get everything she needs.

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is one of the best all-around article databases out there. It offers complete, digitized and searchable back issues of significant research publications in every imaginable discipline, from Art to Physics to Economics to Women’s Studies. So, you can do a search and it’ll bring back results with full-text articles scanned right from the published journals.

Anyway, the JSTOR folks recently added an image-filtering feature to their search box. After you look through the article results, you can click on the Images in JSTOR tab and it highlights the exact pages in articles that have images on your topic. This includes photographs, statistical charts and graphs, scientific diagrams, etc.

In addition, there’s another tab for Images in ARTstor, a database with 500,000 images (and still growing) of art, architecture, clothing, interior design, historical artifacts, posters, videos, maps, and much more. Under this tab you’ll see thumbnail images found by searching for the same topic in ARTstor. When you click on an image, it will open a new window with a larger version that you can download and save. Perfect for PowerPoint presentations.

The student’s search for “Temple of Zeus” and Olympia was very successful in finding articles and images. Mileage may vary. You may need to change your search terms just a bit to get more images from ARTstor.

* As always, if you're a member of the University of Utah community, you can gain access to both the JSTOR and the ARTstor databases through the Article Databases list, linked from the Marriott Library homepage.