Introducing the Bloomsbury Design Library
We are very excited to share a new electronic resource available to students, staff, and faculty: the Bloomsbury Design Library. It is an online platform with full-text access to a variety of reference works and eBooks centered on visual arts and design.
The backbone of the Bloomsbury Design Library is the electronic version of the 3-volume Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design, published in 2017. The encyclopedia contains over 1,700 entries on important designers, movements, and materials from pre-history to the present day, and each entry includes a bibliography for further reading on the subject. Here are a few example entries:
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Day, Lucienne (1917–2010)
- Internet of Things
- McQueen, Lee Alexander (1969–2010)
- Modernism and Design
- Universal Design
The Bloomsbury Design Library also includes Victor Margolin’s monumental 2-volume World History of Design. The chapter “The United States from 1917-1941” is a good example of the depth of this work. The embedded video below is a demonstration of Margolin's painstaking notetaking process.
The collection also contains over 60 full-text eBooks drawn from Bloomsbury Publishing’s design division, from focused titles such as Writing Design: Words and Objects and The Graphic Art of the Underground: A Countercultural History to major reference works including The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design and The Handbook of Design for Sustainability. There’s even a cultural history of IKEA.
The Bloomsbury Design Library is an excellent place to start a research project, and faculty can assign eBook chapters or reference entries as course readings at no cost to students. It can be accessed on or off-campus by current CCA faculty, students, or staff with no limit on the number of users. We encourage everyone in the community to explore this new resource and provide feedback to CCA Libraries!
Main image: Marcia Lloyd, Hand Bag, 1975. English cowhide, English calf hide, fiberfill; wet formed, 28 x 13 x 5 in. Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo credit: Ed Watkins, 2007.