Subscription databases may be accessed from anywhere by current SVA students, faculty and staff. Alumni and CE students may only access onsite at the Main Library.
The following databases are newly acquired or being evaluated for a future subscription.
The complete digital, interactive edition of Josef Albers' seminal work, Interaction of Color. With an additional 60 plates from the 1963 Complete Edition, this new digital edition is also packed with elegant and innovative features that help users explore the book's essential concepts and experiment with color the way Albers intended. Users need to create a personal account to access the content.
The SVA Libraries subscribe to MUSE's Humanities Collection, containing over 225 fulltext journals in the humanities.
Projectr, a streaming platform launched by Grasshopper Films, partners with educational institutions and public libraries throughout North America to present a curated and ever-expanding collection of acclaimed movies, archival restorations, award-winning documentaries and artist-made works from around the world.
Containing over 2,200 titles, VDB Streaming offers access to our vast collections of video art and experimental moving image work to institutions around the world. Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. From the 'Select Institution' drop-down menu, choose ‘School of Visual Arts.’ You will be directed to SVA MyID sign-in.
The most frequently-used databases
Cahiers d'Art Institute (formerly Artifex Press) is a publisher of digital catalogues raisonnés. A catalogue raisonné is the definitive, comprehensive, and annotated compilation of all the known works of an artist. Current catalogues include Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Tim Hawkinson, Agnes Martin, Lucas Samaras, James Siena, and Sol Lewitt. Thirteen more catalogues are forthcoming.
Stock image source with hundreds of thousands of royalty-free photographs, vector images, and videos for use in your projects. Create an account with your SVA email address. Contact library@sva.edu for the current educational key.
Library Stack is a database and archive of digital arts publications, including ebooks, PDFs, apps, music and video from the fields of contemporary art, critical theory, political science, sociology, architecture, urbanism, graphic design and film studies. It has a particular focus on hybrid works: experimental podcasts, custom type-faces, exhibitions bundled into .zip folders, serial journals, collaborative scholarship initiatives and artists’ software.
This link opens in a new windowSearch all of the library's physical and many of the library's digital holdings at once.
Westar Music allows you to download over 300,000 tracks of Production Music, Production Elements and Sound Ideas sound effects in your choice of mp3 and Broadcast WAV files. All new releases are immediately posted on the site and we release thousands of new tracks every year.
Sound Ideas offers sound effects and production elements for television, film sound design, game development, post-production, interactive media and any other professional or educational audio production use you can imagine.
