Art & Design

Welcome to the Art & Design Library subject guide! General library resources for art and design students are listed below. To find subject-specific resources on different areas of art and design, check the discipline pages in this guide.

You'll find most of the hardcopy books on art, design and related disciplines in the City Campus Library, on Level 6. They are arranged on the shelves by call number. Ask a librarian if you need help finding books on the shelf!

Example of a call number

Useful call numbers to browse

Philosophy and theory of art: 700.1
Art history: 709
Landscape architecture: 710s
Architecture: 720s
Sculpture: 730s
Graphic and decorative arts: 740s
Graphic design, illustration: 741.6
Industrial design: 745.2
Interior design: 747
Fashion and textile arts: 746
Painting: 750s
Printmaking: 760s
Photography: 770s
Digital art: 776

Don't forget to also use Library Search and other databases to find ebooks and articles on your topic. The books on the shelf are only a small part of our collections.

Use Library Search to find books and ebooks from the AUT Library collection.

Put some useful keywords or phrases into the search box (remember to put phrases in quotation marks), and click Search

From the options in Combined Results, choose Books & media > See all results

More help with using ebooks from the AUT Library

Library Search

Library Search searches most of our library databases at once. So it is a great place to search for:

• academic journal articles
• industry journal articles
• newspaper and magazine articles

Put some useful keywords or phrases into the search box (put phrases in quotation marks), and click Search

From the options in Combined Results, choose Articles & more > See all results

More help with searching for journal articles

Google Scholar

You can also use Google Scholar to find academic articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. 

Always begin with AUT Google Scholar on the Library website. This will give you more access to full text information, for free.

If you see AUT articlelinker in your results, follow the links to find the full text in a Library database.

Art & design library databases

Getting too many results from Library Search or Google Scholar? You can focus your search by searching for articles in specific library databases. Check the discipline pages in this guide to find useful databases and journals that focus on different areas of art and design.

See the Find images guide for help finding high-quality images that you can reproduce in your academic work. 

You may be asked to research a company or industry sector to find design opportunities, or to provide background information for a product, experience, or service that you design. The Company and Industry Research Guide contains lots of links to helpful resources, plus step by step guides on searching company and industry databases.

You might need to find statistics to support your rationale for a design project, or to incorporate into the work itself.

Our Find statistical data guide contains links to many useful sources of national and international statistics.

Figure.nz is another good source for New Zealand data on a broad range of topics. It provides clear charts of publicly available data, with good metadata (information about the data and the data source). Most of the charts are Creative Commons licensed, meaning you can use them freely in your work, as long as you provide attribution.

If the AUT library does not hold the book or article you need, you may be able to interloan it (borrow it from another library). 

Interloan options