NYARC Partner: Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives comprise one of the largest and oldest art museum libraries in the country. The collection, established in 1823 has been developed to encourage understanding of the Museum's collections and history. Paralleling the Museum's encyclopedic collections, the Museum Libraries and Archives are particularly strong in the arts of the Americas (North and South), Africa, Asia, Ancient Egypt and Islam. The Wilbour Library of Egyptology is one of the world's most comprehensive research libraries for the study of ancient Egypt.

Special collections include costume and fashion sketches, documentary photographs, rare books, and artists' books. An extensive collection of artists' files, supplemented by databases, on Brooklyn-based artists is also available. The Museum Archives contains institutional records, curatorial correspondence, expedition reports, and other related textual and visual records dating to the founding of the institution. Of particular note are the papers of founding curators Stewart Culin, Curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, and William Henry Goodyear, Curator of Fine Arts from 1899 to 1923.

Brooklyn Museum's online catalog is Brookmuse, which is part of Arcade.

Learn more about the collections at the Libraries & Archives blog.