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Quick Guide to Online Research

This guide is a primer on conducting scholarly research remotely, highlighting the most fundamental, important, and most powerful resources available to Sotheby's Institute of Art, New York MA students, faculty, and staff.

Starting Out: The Summon Search

Summon is the SIA Library's "Discovery Layer", meaning it is an aggregator of many of our resources.  It is shared between the libraries of the SIA New York and London campuses.  So a search here is really a search of the library's book catalogue as well as most of (but not all of) our subscription databases.  This is usually the best place to start, but know that it is based on search algorithms that are not perfect, so it is not an exhaustive search of all of our resources.  Also note that Summon searches includes books that are not available remotely.  Online resources are indicated in the results screens, and you can apply filters to search only resources available online.

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