Boston College Libraries Participate in a Pilot Program with Yale University Press

Yale University Press, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, recently developed the Art & Architecture ePortal, designed for students and scholars of art and architectural history.  Boston College Libraries was invited to participate in a one year (July 1, 2018 – June 31, 2019)  pilot program that offers full multi-user access to important monographs and museum catalogs to a university wide community.

Entry page of the Art & Architecture ePortal
Entry page of the Art & Architecture ePortal

The ePortal features content from the top university presses and museum publishers, such as The MIT Press, Harvard Arts Museums,  Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and Yale University Press.

The ePortal covers time periods from Ancient to Contemporary Art and geographic areas from Asia to Middle East to Latin America. It also includes books on General Art History & Theory, Architecture & Urban History, Conservation & Technical Studies, Photography, and more.

Important platform features include searching of full text, images, and metadata; online reading, annotation, citation, sharing, and printing capabilities; supplemental multimedia elements such as 3D models and video, and coursepack building tools for instructors.

The A&A ePortal is a carefully selected collection of some the best books in the field, so it is especially nice that one of the featured books, The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250-1800, is by Boston College recently retired faculty members, Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, both renowned scholars of Islamic Art.

The platform is easy to use and can be of interest to faculty and students beyond the fields of art & architecture, such as in Middle Eastern Studies, History, or Classical Studies.