ABSTRACT
The various arts disciplines such as dance, painting, and sculpture are often considered to belong to the larger category of the humanities. User studies in the humanities have focused primarily on the needs of scholars and academic researchers. User studies in the arts have also investigated the information needs of practicing artists and others involved in arts-related activities. While these studies are often exploratory in nature, they do point out that the needs of practicing artists go well beyond the information services traditionally provided by academic libraries. With the advent of the World Wide Web, artists and other users of information about the arts have access to some of the greatest libraries and museum collections in the world without ever leaving their homes. However, retrieval of textual, image, and sound data still poses significant challenges for the user.
