Access vocabularies
The Getty has extensive vocabularies, including artists’ names, geographic names and the wide-ranging Art & Architecture Thesaurus. http://www.getty.edu/gri/vocabularies/index.htm
Research existing resources
Plan to invest time and effort…
…it’ll be worth it in the end
Check out the Tate site and search their collections for an example of how investment in quality of information brings results – http://www.tate.org