1. Duke catalog
Use your natural language to find ONE book that's relevant. Then go into the record and click the subject headings assigned to that book to find more like it.
These are all library subject headings:
Art -- Economic aspects.
Art -- Europe -- Marketing.
Art -- Europe -- 16th century. [or any century]
Art -- Collectors and collecting -- Europe -- History -- 15th century. [or any century]
Art dealers --Belgium [or any country] --Ghent [or any city] --Correspondence
Painting -- Prices.
Art objects -- Prices.
2. Worldcat - combined catalog of all libraries
Use Worldcat to locate exhibition catalogs and books for interlibrary loan and archives of collections. There's a "libraries with this item" link that shows NC libraries first.
3. HathiTrust and Internet Archive - both these two large text-scanning consortia contain auction catalogs
The archival collection (print and electronic) of major auction house catalogs for the Triangle is held at UNC-Chapel Hill. Duke students have access to these. Individual print auction catalogs appear in their library catalog, UNC Sloane Art Library Catalog. These may be requested through Document Delivery or viewed on site in the Sloane Art Library. Note that most of these catalogs are held off site and must be requested a day or so before viewing them.
UNC also subscribes to the retrospectively digitized catalogs. These, too, are available to any researcher, but must be viewed on site in the Sloane library.
The Sloane is happy to answer your access questions, 919-962-2397
