Collectors and collecting: Getting started

British Museum. Source: SpirosK, Flickr. Licence.

Our search engine Summon is the best place to start looking for articles, books and other resources.  You will find much material about both the history of collecting and the practicalities of collecting today.

• video intro to Summon (4 mins) 
• collection of guides if you need help with particular Summon searches

You may also want to run supplementary searches in these databases:

•  Art & Architecture Source
• Google Scholar: an alternative to Summon
  • info about using Scholar 
  • video intro to Scholar (3 mins)

For introductory articles:

• Oxford Art Online, with articles such as 'Women as Patrons and Collectors'

When searching in Summon, collecting, collector and collection will give different sets of results. You can search for all of these at once like this:

However * does not work properly if you use it within quote marks:    does not retrieve as many results as it should. Instead, you can search for several alternative phrases like this: