For art history departments
One tool your students actually need.
Dartabase is a unified art reference database that lets students find artworks, read provenance, and export correctly formatted citations in seconds. Free for everyone. No account required.
Start a 30-day institutional trial · institutions@dartabase.com
The problem
Your students are piecing together citations from five different museum websites.
When a student writes an essay on, say, Louise Bourgeois, they might find the same work listed differently at Tate, MoMA, and the Whitney. Each has its own citation format, its own display conventions, its own access restrictions. Compiling a bibliography means tab-hopping between five or six sites, reconciling conflicting dates and medium descriptions, and manually formatting every citation.
For a typical research paper, this can take longer than the actual writing. It is also where the most citation errors happen.
What Dartabase does
One search. Every citation format. Done.
Unified catalogue
15,000+ artworks from 29 institutions: MoMA, Tate, the Whitney, Harvard, the Met, AIC, NGA, and more. One search returns results across all of them.
One-click citations
Chicago (notes-bibliography and author-date), MLA 9th, APA 7th, BibTeX, and RIS. Click once to copy. Correct formatting, every time.
Zotero-ready
Every artwork page carries embedded metadata (Dublin Core, Highwire Press, COinS). Zotero's browser connector imports the record automatically.
Exhibition history
Where a work has been shown and when. Essential for provenance essays, attribution research, and writing about reception history.
Stable cite URLs
Every artwork has a permanent /cite/ URL. Students can include it in a bibliography and it will resolve correctly even if the internal ID changes.
Print-ready pages
Artwork pages are print-optimised. Headers, footers, and navigation disappear; the record and citation print clean.
Coverage
Modern and contemporary, with First Nations and Australian coverage.
Holdings include works from Tate (UK), MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Statens Museum for Kunst (Denmark), the Smithsonian's seven art museums, and 19 others. Australian and First Nations works from QAGOMA and Wikidata-linked institutions are included, with Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property advisories on relevant records.
Full source list: dartabase.art/sources
Access
Free for students. API tier for researchers who need programmatic access.
Public access
Always free
Full site access for every student in your department. No account creation, no registration, no tracking. Every artwork, every citation format, Zotero import, stable cite URLs. Permanent.
Institutional API
From $300/year. Invoice and PO accepted.
For research staff who need programmatic access: unlimited API requests, bulk export (CSV/JSON), all four endpoints (artworks, artists, institutions, exhibitions), embeddable search widget, and a dedicated contact. 30-day free trial, no payment required.
Data integrity
Sourced from institutions, credited back to them.
Dartabase aggregates metadata from museum open-data APIs and CC0 datasets. Every record links back to its source institution. We never present ourselves as a substitute for a museum or gallery; Dartabase is a finding tool that drives students to the authoritative source. No full-resolution images are hosted; thumbnails are loaded directly from source CDNs under fair-use rationale.
Indigenous cultural material is handled with care. Records carry per-record advisories for First Nations works, consistent with AIATSIS and Creative Australia protocols.
Next steps
The 30-day trial gives your research staff full institutional-tier access with no payment details required. The key arrives by email within minutes. After the trial, annual billing by invoice or PO.
See also: Pricing · API documentation · Citation guide