Brooklyn History: The Paper Trail @bkpapertrail - Tumblr Blog

May 3rd: Master Talk in the Archives

Today’s museum talk took place focusing in on the Archives. The archives were a development waiting to happen for sometime; as museums, like doctors, do not take care of themselves. They are always looking out rather than seeing the value in looking in. When Deidre started working in the library she and specialist consultant had to seek all the archival materials that were hidden about the museum. The biggest finds were the reports, letters, and other materials of two of the Brooklyn Museum’s establishing curators Stewart Cullin and William Goodyear; each man was equally responsible for the Brooklyn Museum’s collection being ethnically rich and visually dynamic. The archive is rich in photography as well as extensive having minutes and press from the starting inception in 1823. While there is a 25 year look down on institutional files, the information is regular aggregated to provide information on visitor counts or accessions. While the archive is climate controlled, the next project is to get the film on reel digitized as it becomes more and more vulnerable sitting in the stacks.

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April 26th

Everyone has gone to ARLIS and left me to my devices, I used the opportunity to do some research for my Practicum analysis. I got to look at some institutional files such as minutes and press to get an understanding of how the library could be a resource in the study of Brooklyn.

One of the most interesting pieces I found was the “Brooklyn Museum neighborhood study: reinvestment and disinvestment in the Prospect Heights-Crown Heights community.” It was prepared by the Brooklyn Museum and the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in 1986. This was true empirical research about the Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics of the surrounding area. Surprisingly while the crime and neighborhoods have improved, often the feelings of displacement and disinvestments still be felt throughout past and present depictions. Suggestions from community such as participation in block associations and annual community events can actively be seen in current museum practices from First Saturdays and hosting West Indian Day Parade festivities.

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April 19th: All Staff Meeting

The highlight of the All Staff Meeting was the upcoming "Brooklyn Artist Ball."

Twenty artists, one night. Brooklyn Artist Ball:

"The Brooklyn Museum's most anticipated event of the year, the Brooklyn Artists Ball, celebrates Brooklyn artists and the borough's thriving creative community."

Another interesting topic came from the Branding team as an overview of the Museum's core values. Every quarter it seems that to embed the message, the staff receives a quick fresher. At the Brooklyn Museum, community engagement is simple labeled as branding. The way that the "Brand" interacts with the people helps the "Brand" stay relevant. Alisa Martin, senior manager, spoke about the internal values of the museum and the external experience based in the motto: At the Brooklyn Museum, We make art make sense of the world. While Branding has the connotation of marketing development and driving a revenue, the Brooklyn Museum's approach of placing the museum patrons as an inartistic focus seems malignant. The goal of improving the community can not be lost, the museum is for the by people by the people.

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March 29th: Master Talk about Community

This Master Talk focused on the Brooklyn Museum’s community involvement. I was able to interview the head librarian Deirdre Lawrence about how she sees elements of Brooklyn within in the Library and Archives collections. The Library is a way to educate citizens and the museum’s is no different. From 1948 to about 1984, the Museum had a community gallery that presented local art or artistic elements. For example the Brooklyn Museum was the first institution in NYC to present a collection contemporary Native American art. The library keeps all the exhibition catalogs from these shows just like another exhibition. Examining the community gallery’s show books, you can truly see Brooklyn in progress as the ripples of demographic change is reflected in the the interest of what the Museum choose to present. There is an abundance of information embedded in periodicals and journals that is uniquely relevant to Brooklyn, the museum as well as the borough.

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March 22nd

Weeding is a large part of this project; making room in the stacks for new and more interesting volumes. Removing things that are no longer aligned with the Museum's collection goals and anticipating things to come. Here's a glance at our Quick Reference for Keep or Weed.

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Sometime Life is Like Night at the Museum

March 1st

The next auction catalogs are actually gallery guides from Cotswold Gallery:

1934: Another catalogue of one hundred and one drawings by English artists

1933-34: Engravings from J.M.W. Turner's Liber studiorum : including etchings, engravers' proofs and superb first states selected from the Ruskin & other recently dispersed collections.

193?: Catalogue of one hundred and one drawings by English artists./# 272553043

Dec 1929: The fifteenth catalogue :original drawings and engravings. Part I Part II Water-colours and other drawings by English artists. Engravings from Turner's 'Southern coast'

1928: The fourteenth Catalgogue: Engravings from J.M.W. Turner's "Liber Studiorum" and the So-Called Sequel

1927: Original engravings by & after J.M.W. Turner

1927:The thirteenth catalogue of original engravings & drawings. Part I: Etchings, line-engravings, woodcuts, &c., by old and modern masters; Part II: Water-colours & other drawings by English artists.

Probably left over from the “J.M.W. Turner Watercolors from The British Museum in the 1960s”/ And whoever the curator or librarian in charge was adamant we keep these gallery/ auction catalogs for “prices, names and reproductions” because it's written in pencil on ever cover with the date and their initials.

After Review: Most of the titles were sent to Frick, and one was accessioned. It's difficult to make these choices about to do once an exhibit is over, especially if the subject can't be tied back into the overall collection.

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February 22nd: More on NYARC

Another interesting presentations from the NYARC Meeting was Artifex Press.

Artifex Press is a new company dedicated to the production of digital catalogues raisonnés. Currently, their first two catalogues: Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967-present, and Jim Dine: Sculpture, 1983-present are available online for limited free subscriptions.

From the site, these are the following advantages of Digital Raisonne collection:

Discover updated, current information.

Search and sort information using a variety of criteria.

Access catalogues through any web-enabled device.

Create a personalized login.

Choose between multiple views for ease of search.

View multiple images per artwork, as well video and other multimedia.

Search within a given catalogue or across the entire Artifex Press library.

I was impressed with the smart choices the team made in database building, especially limiting front end metadata after user testing. First each catalogue is it's own database and has categories that pertain to that artist's work, making it most beneficial to the user. Eventually if they want to the Raisonnes could be linked because they are stored together on a larger linked database. But for now as they launch, they want to just provide the best Raisonne per artist. Each image has rich metadata on the back in for inventory and other administrative tasks, but now it's kept clean, rich and user friendly.

Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967-Present is a searchable, sortable web publication that will be periodically updated as new information becomes available.

Another interesting point, is that the images are uploaded at print, best resolution quality but then downsized; they are anticipating better screen technology and don't want to have to go back and re-upload.

Explore here: https://artifexpress.com/

#journal #NYARC

February 19th: 2013 NYARC Annual Staff Meeting

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. Attending the annual meeting was an enlightening look into what's truly happening in the Museum and Art Library field.

Paola Antonelli's , Appointed Director of Research and Development at MoMA, speech spoke to why I truly to go into the Museum field via the Librarian route. Her main point was that the museum is the space in between our physical and digital spaces. There is so much discussion of digitization, but not much said about integration of the two planes. Under her leadership, the MoMA Research and Development department has been providing information and critical tools to identify and exploring new directions and opportunities for this new frontier. She hosted Salons to discuss what curation truly means in the 21st century and is there a difference between a "Tumblr of Tumblrs" and a Gallery of Modrain's.

She also mentioned this guy: Simon Pierro, a digital magician… enough said:

#journal #NYARC

February 15th

Poor Standards

Sometimes it hard to match catalogues in the OCLC. Especially regarding Foreign catalogues, data entry is either the bare minimum or over complicated. For example Galerie Charpentier is an old French Auction house that has a simple cover title such as Tableaux modernes that matches several other volumes. Or volumes are titled by an intense front page that acts as an advertising broadsheet for the show, such as 1: tableaux anciens par: Th. Géricault, L. Giordano, Sir H. Raeburn, H. Robert; primitifs italiens, espagnols et flamands par ou attribués à L. Borrassa, G. David, Duccio, Le Maître de la Légende de Saint-Augustin; M. Palmezzano, T. De Bartolo, etc, that will continue into the 500 MARC field.

Between the confusion of titles and parallel titles, one record shows 4 possible matches, and it just daunting and annoying.

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Inside looking out

January 30th: Special Tour of the Grolier Club

The Grolier Club opened an exhibition of extraordinary rare books illustrating the origins and evolution of the modern museum. An exhibition of this kind truly highlights how a library's collection can come to life and enrich, or even become, part of a Museum's exhibition strategy. All the interns were invited to join Deirdre Lawrence, Head Library, on an exclusive behind the scenes tour of the exhibit.

Museums started in the 16th century as European collectors filled special rooms or cabinets with miscellaneous conglomerations of items, including paintings and drawings, plant specimens, animals including monstrosities, shells, fossils, coinage, etc. Many items were those of ethnographical interest from the New World, Africa, and East Asia with the occasional Egyptian mummy and two-headed calf and other rare and curious artifacts.

Some of the auction catalogues were as exquisite and majestic as the Wunderkammers themselves. The catalogues were a reflection of cabinets being status symbols; the highly decorative pages showcased the owner's wealth and intellectual prowess. In the long term, the cabinets of curiosities served various function to each owner: inheritance to passed on, begins of municipal collection, or sold as unit or piecemeal.

The proud owners of Wunderkammers sometimes published elaborate illustrated catalogues to document their collections. “Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899” showcased showcase dozens of the rarest and most important of these books, drawn from the private collections and institutional libraries. From elaborate illustrated catalogues to broadsides of traveling exhibitions for the likes of P.T. Barnum, the Grolier Club used books, not objects to create and visually stunning exhibit that tracks the raise of the modern art galleries and natural history museums.

#journal #grolier club

January 25th

When cataloguing its necessary to pay close attention to each individual text to be sure that it is not annotated or has an unique feature such as bookplates. Bookplates tend to appear in donated copies, and add value to the Museum's volume.

In OCLC, the field would be as follows:

500__|3Brooklyn:|aBookplate"Vorwärts und Beständig BIBLIOTHECA Osc. Münsterberg No. 2939."

The Brooklyn Museum Library has blogged about the variety and uniqueness, check it out:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2008/07/03/little-treasures-from-the-past/

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January 11th

Tokyo Sales Catalogues circa 1910s

Without the discernible language skills, efficiently cataloguing the six “Tokyo Sales” catalogues is nearly impossible. However, this is what I’ve found out that can be useful.

The only English characters exist in what appears to be contact information for the auction house, Kinbei Murata, address and telephone.

According the LC Authorities, Kinbei Murata is a variant of this corporate title, Murata Kinbē (村田金兵衞)

In OCLC when Murata Kinbē is used as a keyword search, it yields 26 results in the proper time frame of 1900- 1921. These results seem to be the proper volumes according to physical dimensions; however without the language, it hard to really match. Some are cataloged as SCIPIO files, some as just books. Whoever brought these books to library put the month and year of sale in most text as well as annotated prices; one seems to even have been a gift (1920-21)

Tokyo Sales catalogues 1910-12

Tokyo Sales catalogues 1913- 14

Tokyo Sales catalogues 1915-16

Tokyo Sales catalogues 1917

Tokyo Sales catalogues Oct. 1919 (most probable OCLC: 51792133)

Tokyo Sales catalogues1920-21

After Review : Backstage Library Works is on retainer for translating foriegn works for the BM. Because the high level of importance that Asian works plays in the Brooklyn Museum collection, the extra expanse will be spared.

Knight Frank & Rutley (27-May-1927): The Margrave Pallavicini collection and other properties. (London) Old Masters paintings of Austro-Hungarian branch of Italian art family; Rebound and repaired by Work Projects Administration for the Brooklyn Museum Frick has; MET seems to have two copies; Overall holding about 12 institutions.

After Review: It’s borderline for keep/weed. Yet the Brooklyn Museum volunteers "Rebound and Repaired by the Work Projects Admin" repaired it, so it was kept.

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December 2012: Pre-Practicum

12.19.12

Making the case for preservation envelopes:

Collections du Major Lambert d’ Audenarde from 1926, donations from the Schweitzer Gallery. There isn't much know about the Belgium auction; however, the two part catalog is rare and falling apart.

If it will stay in the collection, the precautions need to be made so that it will survive life in the stacks.

Permanent link to this page:

http://arcade.nyarc.org:80/record=b461405~S1

How it's Done:

Search WorldCat holdings to determine rarity: if 4 or less libraries own it, consider for Special Collections

Rehousing SELECT FRAGILE catalogs into acid-free envelopes: This would be for a small number of catalogs that are slim and very fragile and represent some of our older holdings. Place select catalogs in acid free envelope and then label and barcode the envelope.

After cataloging and labeling, return cataloged items to their stacks shelf (where you first found them).

12.20.12

For Review: Francisco Goya : Sein leben im Spiegel der Graphik, 1996

While this book appears to be an auction catalog, it actually an exhibition catalog that includes a price list.

Kornfeld in Bern had a Goya show from November 21 1996 until January 1997.

It probably should not be catalogued with the auction catalogs; it is on the work table for review.

Frick also has a copy as well: http://arcade.nyarc.org:80/record=b175098~S1

After Review : Rerouted to general stacks; exhibition catalogs masquerading as auction catalogs.

12.28.12

So today, I finished up the Kornfeld’s that needed to be catalogued. The Tokyo house is mostly turn of the century 1910s, so I am going through those more thoroughly next week.

Basically I decided to start weeding the large Ketterer collection. Most of it is Modern Art/Art Deco stuff (about 70 volumes) , so I just building the ARLIS list and putting them on the weed shelf.

The collection has these weird “Lagerkatalog”/Stock catalogues, some of them are in WorldCat but not all them; however, they aren’t exactly auction catalogs. I put them on the ARLIS weed list as they are mostly European paintings or lithographs, yet they can be moved at another date.

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