Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
This online collection is probably one of my favorites (but I also may be a bit biased as the MoMA is my favorite museum!). The MoMA offers the visitor a variety of ways to search through their database and it is easy to navigate through. You can either select a genre, and within each genre you can choose to browse all of the works, highlights of the genre, or recent acquisitions. Or you can choose to browse the entire online collection where it will prompt you to search by artist, title, date, keywords, department, or classification. Once you select a work, a thumbnail of the image pops up and includes important information about the object, as well as if there are any related items in the gift shop!
http://www.moma.org/collection/
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
The LACMA online collection is another great database that I found to be easy to search through and very informative. Just on the opening page you can choose to browse the different departments within the permanent collection, browse the artists by last name, or do a quick search by typing in a keyword. I tested out the keyword section and found that if you use a general term such as “costume,” it will tell you your word is too broad (and comes up with a large number of works it is tied to) and needs to be refined. Each work has a thumbnail, just like MoMA’s website, and contains all the information of the work you are researching.
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery’s online collection is probably one of the more detailed and thorough databases in terms of searching for a particular work. It contains search options seen in the other museums stated above, but what I like most about this online collection is that it offers you the chance to search provenance and accession numbers, which is not found on any other website I visited. There is also an advanced search option, which lets you choose a medium, school, style, and popular subjects. I liked how this database created such a detailed searching method, which made it easier to find a specific object.
http://www.nga.gov/collection/index.shtm
Blanton Museum of Art
And finally I decided to check out my alma mater’s museum website, The University of Texas at Austin. Being as it is the largest university museum in the country (and just recently opened up in the spring of 2005), I was pleased with the resources the database contained. When you come upon the collections page, it is divided up into: European paintings, American and Contemporary Art, Latin American Art, and Prints & Drawings. When you click on a category, it lets you look at a gallery of selected works, curatorial comments, and recent acquisitions. I like the inclusion of the curatorial comments as it gives the visitor some general information about that collection. If you click the “gallery” link of a specific category, you can then search that collection through keywords, artist, title, or date. All works contain a thumbnail image. http://blantonmuseum.org/works_of_art/collections/index.cfm