Library Stack is a unique archive and lending library with digital collections relating to art, design, film, architecture, experimental sound and critical theory. By working directly with a variety of publishers, firms, artists, and academics, Library Stack provides access to a diverse array of born-digital resources ranging from articles, eBooks and zines to podcasts, music and films.
In addition to providing digital publications from established commercial publishers including Aperture, Sternberg and MACK, Library Stack’s ongoing collaboration with small independent presses, companies, and individuals means that users can access resources that exist outside of mainstream academic and commercial publishing.
The content on offer will be of interest to students across a wide variety of courses here at the University and represents a rich and varied range of innovative formats that extend beyond traditional outputs such as articles and books - including software, sound recordings, and artworks.
Students and staff from the University of Manchester should register using their University email address in order to gain access to both the Open Access and reserved circulation items. By creating an account, you can also make use of the ‘Bookshelf’ feature which allows you to borrow reserved circulation items and save, organise and annotate items, creating your own collections based on your research interests.
As a result of heavy usage during the library’s innovative ProQuest trial of primary resources which ran for the course of the last academic year to support researchers in the Humanities, the Library has now purchased Art and Architecture Archive.
This major research resource incorporates the digitized back-files of many of the foremost art and architecture magazines of the twentieth century. Offering full text and high-resolution access to the archives of key consumer and trade publications, it comprises an invaluable collection of essential primary sources for studying the history of these disciplines. In addition to general periodicals such as Apollo (1925-2005) which offer feature pieces and an opportunity to investigate the contemporary reception of specific works and exhibitions the collection incorporates extensive back-files of two key architectural periodicals, The Architectural Review (1896-2005) and Architects’ Journal (1929-2005).
The ability to cross-search these periodicals within a single database allows researchers to readily locate a comprehensive body of primary source material relating to particular practitioners, topics and movements, across a variety of publications and document types. A single search may therefore return industry news items, interviews with major architects, and features about technological developments, as well as high-quality photographs / illustrations, architectural plans, statistics, and reviews, so providing a straightforward ‘first step’ for independent research. To further facilitate discovery all periodical titles in the collection are also now individually indexed on Library Search.
Databases provide access to high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, dissertations and other sources.
These databases have been especially chosen for this subject area.
When carrying out your research for a piece of work, you will need to search more than one database to find all of the journal articles relevant to your topic, as each database covers different journals.
Grey literature refers to research that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form. The term includes the following types of information:
The British Library reports, Conferences and Theses can be searched for through the British Library Integrated Catalogue.
Use these p tags if you need multiple paragraphs
The Conference Proceedings Citation Index Literature via Web of Science is taken from the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions worldwide. Available in two editions: Sciences & Technology and Social Science Literature from the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions worldwide. Available in two editions: Sciences & Technology and Social Science.
Google Scholar provides a quick way to search for scholarly literature across disciplines and sources. You can find articles, theses, books, abstracts and grey literature from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other sources.
Grey Net provides information about grey literature. GreySource Index provides a list of web-based grey literature resources.
MIAR is a matrix of data from more than 100 international indexing and abstracting databases (citation, multidisciplinary or specialised databases) and journal repertoires, which is developed with the purpose of providing useful information for the identification of scientific journals and the analysis of their diffusion. The system works through the elaboration of a correspondence matrix between the journals, identified by their ISSN, and the databases and directories that index or include them.
MIAR has more than 48,000 journal records, but a search in MIAR using a valid ISSN number will return information on the diffusion of any journal in the world at the sources analysed by MIAR, whether or not it has its own record in MIAR.
MIAR 2023 live. Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals.
OpenGrey is a multidisciplinary European resource which provides open access to 700,000 bibliographical references of grey literature produced in Europe. It covers science, technology, biomedical science, economics, social science and humanities.
Examples of grey literature include technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers and official publications.
Science.gov searches over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results. Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
Scopus is a user-friendly database covering some 12,000 journals from all aspects of science, technology and medicine, with some quite sophisticated features.
Getting started with subject databases
This resource explores some of the key features of subject databases, demonstrating that while they can initially appear daunting and complicated, they can be as easy to use as any online shopping site
View all workshops and online resources in this area on the
My Learning Essentials webpages.
The library provides comprehensive access to a vast archive of British and overseas newspapers, including electronic access to many current publications. Newspapers are an excellent primary source research tool, not only providing reports about events and issues but also editorials and letters that can be extremely useful for deeper understanding. Access the Newspaper guide for further information.
The latest acquisition to our newspaper databases. Users can study the progression of issues over time by browsing issues extending from the newspaper’s first publication in May 1827 to effectively the present day (within 1 week), including articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more. Searching facilitated by user-friendly support and indexing tools, with hit-term highlighting, searchable PDFs, and image downloads in PDF format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.