While the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan wage on, NGOs, scholars, and governments from around the world have worked to raise awareness as well as to safeguard the wealth of cultural heritage currently at risk in the Greater Middle East, as evidenced in the recent exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives is pleased to announce that the Durr Friedley Records, 1906-1918, and the William Church Osborn Records, 1904-1953, have been recently processed and are now open for scholarly research.

In 2009, The Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council published one of its most important efforts to date: a hand-printed scroll (the ancient "book form" of Asia) by the artist Yun-Fei Ji titled The Three Gorges Dam Migration.  The eight-foot-long image, at first glance resembling a traditional Chinese landscape, depicts the flooded landscapes of the Three Gorges area in contemporary China; it reproduces, in the artist's calligraphy, historic and contemporary accounts of the Yangtze River and the upheaval caused by the construction of the world’s largest dam.

JSTOR is collaborating with the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Art Reference Library in a pilot project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to understand how auction catalogs can best be preserved for the long term and made most easily accessible for scholarly use. Auction catalogs are vital for provenance research as well as for the study of art markets and the history of collecting. Libraries, however, face a range of challenges with respect to their catalog collections, including preservation concerns and shelf space constraints.
 

The MoMA Library is hosting an Art Book Swap on Feb. 6. All are welcome – bring some books for swapping!   Art Book Swap New York   When: February 6, 2010 Noon to 5pm   Where: The Museum of Modern Art Cullman Education and Research Building 4 West 54th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)   What:   Free and open to the public. Bring your art books and swap one-for-one with hundreds of donated art books.   

Somehow, advertising just seemed more charming a hundred years ago. Long before the days of pop-ups on websites and garish LCD billboards, businesses promoted themselves with delicate, artistic, finely printed cards, suitable for collecting, trading, and compiling in scrapbooks.

Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was founded in 1976 by Leonard Koren in Venice, CA. The first issue in May/June of that year was a modest 8 ½” x 11” black and white paper pamphlet. In this issue, Koren introduces the magazine to his audience: “Wet is a magazine devoted to upgrading the quality of your bathing experience. Hopefully, in the great American tradition of Coca Cola, doggie diapers and Pet Rocks, Wet will become one of those things you never imagined you needed until you find you can’t live without it.” Early issues of Wet include articles about bathing, showering, hot tubs, personal hygiene, food, and yoga.

In June 2009, Arcade was added to artlibraries.net – Virtual Catalogue for Art History. Artlibraries.net, formerly known as the Virtueller Katalog Kunstgeschichte (VKK), provides access to over 8 million bibliographic records for periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, auction catalogues, exhibition catalogues and much more.