Citing Art: A Selection of Style Manuals

Lee Sorensen of the Lilly Library at Duke University recently wondered what style guides colleagues were referencing for art citations. What follows is a summary of the responses, which overwhelming prefer Purdue's Owl, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Diana Hacker Reasearch & Documentation Online site. Duplicate mentions were removed for clarity.

Thanks, Lee!

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[Cristine Rom, Library Director, Gund Library: A Library for Visual Artists]

We have art and design examples in our MLA and Turbian/Chicago style guides on our web page www.cia.edu/library in the specialized guides section which our students find very handy.

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[Bronwen Billeti, Associate Librarian, Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College:]

The first is an online version of a print source, Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age, Fifth Edition, by Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister, hosted by St. Martin's. It has excellent examples of both Chicago and MLA and has a lovely graphic annotation style, which is very easy on the eyes.

General page: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/index.htm
MLA page example: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/RES5e_ch08_s1-0011.html

Emily Carr Writing Centre MLA Style Guide
PDF linked on this page http://www.ecuad.ca/library/research/citationguides
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[Carmen Orth-Alfie, University of Kansas]

Check out Cite Source done by Trinity College Library in Hartford, Conn. http://citesource.trincoll.edu/.  This is project support by a CTW Mellon Grant and they use a Creative Commons license.  Here is an example, http://citesource.trincoll.edu/chicago/documents/chicagoartwork.pdf that is for “art work” using the Chicago style.

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 [Solvej Vorster, Librarian : Hiddingh Hall Library, University of Cape Town]

Our Library devised its own handbook and it was revised recently.  You can find it here: http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/citationhandbook.pdf

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 [Rebecca Friedman, Princeton]

I’ve put up a few things on my LibGuide, which probably needs to be updated at this point, but feel free to point to only if it’s useful.

URL: http://libguides.princeton.edu/artfaq

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[Dawn Sueoka Consulting Archivist, Shangri La, Doris Duke Foundation]

The Association of Art Editors Style Guide may be a good place to start:

http://www.artedit.org/styleguide.htm

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[Christine L. Sundt, Editor
Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation]

Based on my experience as an editor using Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), I  highly recommend it for those of us working in the arts: it covers captions, exhibitions, catalogs, and much more (CMOS is available both in print and online. The online version allows for keyword searching as well as creating your own annotations and lists. The CMOS editors also answer questions about things not covered or ambiguously described, in their monthly Q&A, the answers of which are also available to online subscribers (which is a bargain at $35/annually).
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[Moira Steven, Library Director, Joanne Waxman Library @ Maine College of Art]

I've been using the book Cite Right as a source for most kinds of citation in most formats.  I'm also referring students to BibMe.org, which is quite good - and free!

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[Linda Duychak , Kohler Art Library Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison]

Also not what you asked for, but perhaps useful, is this citation generator.  It creates citations in MLA and Chicago, although not footnote cites.

http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/

A local librarian recommended this to me a year or so ago.  I haven't registered or used it extensively.  But when I checked it quickly, the results looked accurately formatted to me.

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 [Helen Chapman, Hawaii]

Not the answer to your question, but something related that may be helpful to your students.

After using MS Word 2010 a few times, I find the REFERENCES function to work well for footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies, without having to refer to style manuals. You choose among Chicago, Turabian, APA and a few others; choose the kind of citation (book, article, etc.); then fill in a template.

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 [Heidi Rempel, MSLIS student, Syracuse University]

Unfortunately, they don't have a Chicago guide but the OWL writing lab at Purdue has an excellent set of MLA and APA citation examples that I've used rather a lot in my MSLIS work over the last couple of years.  http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/   They do have a citation comparison that includes Chicago at   http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/949/01/ in PDF format