Contemporary Culture Index
cultural database
Contemporary Culture Index (ccindex) is a multidisciplinary international database which provides access to publications in "architecture, art, cinema, cultural studies, design, literature, music, philosophy, photography and social sciences". It was founded in 2002 by Javier Anguera Phipps, serials librarian at the library of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, and in 2013 it received a grant from the Graham Foundation.
The database is updated daily and is maintained by a team of librarians based in the United States (Somerville, Massachusetts and Manhattan) and Spain (Barcelona). It is described as "address[ing] two tendencies in current scholarship: a homogenization of research sources due to the “search engine effect” (i.e., to believe that what exists and is known is what is retrieved by a commercial search engine) and a multiplicity of modes of access to online materials."
A reviewer for the Art Libraries Society of North America criticised "the deliberately amateurish look and feel of the website" while agreeing that it "responds well on mobile devices", and said that "The true value to this collection is the access to the lesser-known and out-of-print publications that can be found within this index."
It has ISSN 1944-4621.
“Contemporary Culture Index” enters the record as cultural database. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Contemporary, Culture and Index can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Contemporary Culture Index” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Contemporary, Culture and Index provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q107087423. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2013 and 1944.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Contemporary Culture Index primary sources, Contemporary Culture Index archive and Contemporary research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Contemporary Culture Index” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.