brooklyn museum

Processing the acquisitions on the Special Collections shelf is always a highlight of my week, especially when I know we’re expecting mail from Printed Matter or a book artist has been by to visit recently.  I approach the task knowing that strange and beautiful books of all shapes and sizes await me, and that processing will most likely not entail the usual rote click-click-click through, a cog in the wheel of acquisitions procedure, as the majority of the artist’s books we acquire are not in OCLC's WorldCat, a world-wide catalog of library catalogs, and require a unique new record to be generated.
 

Over the past three years, 30 talented interns from the Pratt Institute, School of Information & Library Science, have passed through our doors here at the Brooklyn Museum Libraries, Archives and Digital Lab, thanks to an IMLS-funded grant (Institute of Museum and Library Services). These M-LEAD (Museum Library Education and Digitization) interns have been instrumental in a variety of important contributions, from processing and describing archival materials, to digitizing images for online accessibility, to clearing copyright and cataloging library resources, just to name a few!    

While I usually have artist books on-the-brain to some degree, they’ve been on my mind more than usual lately, as I prepare a presentation to Brooklyn Museum interns and staff in early April highlighting recent acquisitions to Brooklyn’s artists' books collection. I’d like to take the opportunity to share a few of these with our readers here at the NYARC.org blog.

Right now the display cases at the Brooklyn Museum Libraries contain a selection of our holdings of artists’ books from the Women’s Studio Workshop. These books complement the exhibition entitled “Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop” being held at the Grolier Club from December 8, 2010 through February 5, 2011.

In the Gilded Age, exhibitions at small galleries, society clubs, and associations played a significant role in the art world and are avidly studied by art historians now. The libraries of the Frick and Brooklyn Museum have been awarded a Metropolitan New York Library Council grant to digitize ephemeral exhibition checklists, pamphlets, and catalogs from eleven historically significant galleries, society clubs, and arts associations operating from the late 19th to early 20th century.

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries have recently acquired over 160 books concerning Mexican, Haitian, and Spanish Colonial Folk Art, 92 of which are unique to NYARC libraries’ holdings and over a dozen that are not in WorldCat at all. This exciting gift comes to us through the generosity of Margery Nathanson, proprietor of the Grass Roots Gallery de Artes Populares, which was in operation from 1980 to 1990.

In case you were wondering, searching a card catalog is officially an obsolete skill.  As most librarians and researchers know, this is not exactly the truth as there still remain pockets of very valuable cards out there that have yet to be converted to an online format and provide the only access into historically important collections, but I digress … Most card catalogs are obsolete and stand as artifacts to our pre-Internet past, but we (i.e., librarians) love card catalogs and are always excited to see the cards that our predecessors painstakingly crafted take on a new life as a work of art.

Since its conscious decision in 1970 to begin actively collecting artists’ books, the Brooklyn Museum Library has amassed a varied and substantial collection comprised of over 2,500 titles, and further supported by numerous artists’ files, and related exhibition catalogues and relevant publications.  Now, with the recently acquired Smoller Gift, generously donated to the Brooklyn Museum from Arnold Smoller, the collection has been further enriched and expanded by the inclusion of over 40 artists’ books and livres d’artiste.