If your artist is someone who is a relative newcomer, or not well known outside his creative field, it's possible that information will only be available in journal or magazine articles, since they are published more frequently than books-and also tend to be the most current sources available. To find critical articles, just as to find criticism in books, you will need to search for your artist as a subject. Instead of searching the online catalog, however, you search for articles in indexes, which are listings of articles by subject and by year of the article's publication.
A large majority of critical articles will be in the form of book reviews, which are critical essays designed to tell their readers whether a book is worth reading. Book reviews may be very short and often do not provide enough information to be considered serious criticism. However, book reviews published in scholarly journals often go into great depth and may indeed be considered criticism. In order to find a book review, you need to know the year in which the book was first published (check for the earliest copyright date on the back of the title page). If you don't find a review listed in an index covering the date of your book's publication, check an index for the following year.
Indexes owned by the Shorter University Library which list book reviews exclusively are:
Book Review Digest, 1905 - current.
Index section, main floor
Book Review Index, 1972 - 1998.
Index section, main floor
Other indexes which include book reviews and are accessible through the Shorter University Libraries are:
Humanities index, April 1974 - current.
Index section, main floor. (Also available online as Wilson Humanities Full-Text*; indexing, 1984 - current; full-text, 1995 - current.)
MLA International Bibliography*, 1926 – current.
Music Index, 1949 - 1985 and 1989 (print).
Index section, main floor. (Also available online*, 1974 - current.)
New York Times Index, 1960 - 1986 (print).
Index section, main floor. (Also available online* from ProQuest Newspapers*, 1999 - current.)
Readers' Guide, 1922 - 2003 (print).
Index section, main floor. (Also available online as Reader's Guide Full-Text*; indexing, 1983- ; abstracts, 1984-; full text, 1994- ).
Religion Index One (RIO), 1971 - current.
Index section, main floor
Social Sciences Index, April 1940 - 2003.
Index section, main floor
*Part of the Database Offerings in Galileo, Georgia's Virtual Library.
