Established | 1965 |
---|---|
Location | 1000 5th Ave, New York City, US |
Coordinates | 40°46′45″N73°57′47″W / 40.779165°N 73.962928°W |
Type | Non-circulating research library |
Collection size | 1,020,000 |
Director | Ken Soehner (Chief Librarian) |
Chairperson | Olivier Berggruen |
Public transit access | Subway: to 86th Street Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M79, M86 |
Website | Library website |
The Thomas J. Watson Library is the main research library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and supports the research activities of the museum staff, as well as outside researchers. It is located in the Met's main building, The Met Fifth Avenue.
Located on the first floor of the Met, the Watson Library can be visited without appointment. At the museum, each department also maintains its own internal library, most of which have materials that are requestable online through the Watson Library catalog. The collection is a closed-shelf reference library, and materials are not available for borrowing by the general public, but may be used in a secure reading room; some items may be borrowed by Met staffers.
In addition, the Met hosts the Nolen Library on its ground floor, a collection of 10,000 items in an open-shelf, non-circulating collection intended for the general public, including children. The Nolen Library also includes a large collection of children's books, as well as specialized curriculum materials for educators.
The Watson Library's collection contains over 1,020,000 volumes, including monographs and exhibition catalogs; over 21,000 periodical titles; and more than 140,000 auction and sale catalogs. [1] The library also includes a reference collection, a rare book collection, manuscript items, and vertical file collections. The library is accessible to anyone over 18, simply by registering online and providing a valid photo ID. [2] Once a free account is set up, a researcher may issue reserve requests online, in advance of an on-site visit, and may also issue requests in person at the library.
The library houses several display cases which are used for temporary exhibits of books and publications from its collections. Exhibits may focus on a single artist, an artistic movement, a publication medium or style, or any other topic of interest. Items which are on exhibit are clearly flagged in the online catalog as temporarily unavailable for use.
The Watson Library is named for Thomas J. Watson, former chairman and CEO of IBM . [3] Its committee is chaired by art historian Olivier Berggruen. [4]
The Digital Collections seeks to digitize rare and unique materials that have not yet been digitized anywhere else on the web. [5]
Highlights from the Digital Collections include:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates a free and open Internet. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".
Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.
Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.
The University of Michigan Library is the academic library system of the University of Michigan. The university's 38 constituent and affiliated libraries together make it the second largest research library by number of volumes in the United States.
The Fenimore Art Museum is a museum located in Cooperstown, New York on the west side of Otsego Lake. Collection strengths include the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, American fine and folk art, 19th and early 20th century photography, as well as rare books and manuscripts. The museum's mission is to connect its audience to American and New York State cultural heritage by organizing exhibits and public programs that "engage, delight and inspire."
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Trade literature is a general term including advertising, customer technical communications, and catalogues.
The National Art Library (NAL) is a major reference library, situated in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), a museum of decorative arts in London. The NAL holds the UK's most comprehensive collection of both books as art and books about art, which includes many genres and time periods. The NAL is open to the public, and as a closed reference library, items must be requested through the staff and cannot be removed from the reading room. The collections cover a wide range of art and design topics, including books about artists and art techniques, and consists of many different collections materials, including archival materials, artist's books, and children's literature. The library also serves as the museum's curatorial department for book arts. As a reference library, the NAL also serves as a training library for students, curators and museum staff, and the public.
Jefferson R. Burdick (1900–1963) was an American electrician and a collector of printed ephemera, including postcards, posters, cigar bands, and other types of printed materials dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1960s. He is best known for collecting trading and baseball cards in The American Card Catalog, otherwise known as the ACC.
A special library is a library that provides specialized information resources on a particular subject, serves a specialized and limited clientele, and delivers specialized services to that clientele. Special libraries include corporate libraries, government libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, museum libraries, news libraries. Special libraries also exist within academic institutions. These libraries are included as special libraries because they are often funded separately from the rest of the university and they serve a targeted group of users.
The Robert Goldwater Library in the department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a noncirculating research library dedicated to the documentation of visual arts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Native and Precolumbian America. The library is open to adult researchers, including college and graduate students.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
In the context of libraries and archives, an inventory refers to a detailed list or record of the items, materials, or resources held within a collection.
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources for research communities. Called a groundbreaking partnership, NYARC also provides a framework for collaboration among art research libraries.
The State Library of Massachusetts in Boston, Massachusetts was established in 1826 and "supports the research and information needs of government, libraries, and people through ... services and access to a comprehensive repository of state documents and other historical items." It "opened in 1826 and has been in its present location in the State House since the 1890s." The State Library falls under the administration of the governor.
Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-profit, tax-exempt consortium of American libraries with collections of medieval and early modern manuscripts, that is, handwritten books made in the traditions of the world's scribal cultures. The DS Catalog represents these manuscript collections in a web-based platform form building a national union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and early modern studies.
D-Scribe Digital Publishing is an open access electronic publishing program of the University Library System (ULS) of the University of Pittsburgh. It comprises over 100 thematic collections that together contain over 100,000 digital objects. This content, most of which is available through open access, includes both digitized versions of materials from the collections of the University of Pittsburgh and other local institutions as well as original 'born-electronic' content actively contributed by scholars worldwide. D-Scribe includes such items as photographs, maps, books, journal articles, dissertations, government documents, and technical reports, along with over 745 previously out-of-print titles published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The digital publishing efforts of the University Library System began in 1998 and have won praise for their innovation from the leadership at the Association of Research Libraries and peer institutions.
The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) is a nonprofit organization that photographs, catalogs, and provides free access to collections of manuscripts located in libraries around the world.
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy was an art exhibition held 7 May - 1 September 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring clothing inspired by superhero costuming, along with actual costumes from superhero films. Sponsored by Giorgio Armani, the exhibit was curated by Andrew Bolton of the Costume Center, and author Michael Chabon wrote material for the exhibition catalog. Backdrops for the exhibition were derived from Alex Ross's Justice, Jamie Rama, Nathan Crowley, Dermot Power, Gary Frank, and photographs of Thomas Jane as The Punisher, Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.