Collections: Libraries and Archives

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives are a non-circulating reference collection providing information about the Museum, its history, and collections, as well as the broader areas of art and cultural history from antiquity to the present. The collection was founded in 1823 with the establishment of the Brooklyn Apprentices Library Association, which later evolved into the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the parent organization of the Museum. This collection has been developed to encourage understanding of the Museum’s object collections and cultural history. The fine arts are well represented, with research material on painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, photography, decorative arts, costumes, and textiles. The research collections also cover anthropology, archeology, and ethnology with resources in various formats, including books, exhibition and auction catalogs, pamphlets, files, multimedia, and electronic resources. The research collections are divided into two Libraries and the Museum Archives.

Main Museum Library
The main Museum Library is particularly strong in the arts of the Americas (North and South), Africa, Asia, and Islam. 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 Wilbour Library of Egyptology
The Wilbour Library of Egyptology is one of the world’s most comprehensive research libraries for the study of ancient Egypt. The nucleus of the collection comes from the personal library of Charles Edwin Wilbour, an American Egyptologist who also assembled the Museum’s extensive Egyptian antiquities collection. With over 35,000 volumes, the Wilbour Library is an important resource for textual and visual information about the history of ancient Egypt. It also holds material on art and culture of the ancient Middle East.

Museum Archives
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. The history of the Museum is well documented in records dating back to 1913 and an extensive collection of photographs.

Visiting the Libraries and Archives
The Museum Libraries and Archives are available to the public Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m.–12 p.m. and 1–4:30 p.m. and on the first Saturday of each month, 1–4 p.m. (except for July, August, and September). Visitors are encouraged to search the Library Online Catalogue and to e-mail citations for materials needed. Please contact us if you would like more information about these collections, or to reserve time for extensive research. The Libraries can be reached via e-mail at library@brooklynmuseum.org or by phone (718) 501-6307.

To submit materials to the Library for possible inclusion in the artists’ book collection, please send a résumé and exhibition history, a disk (or no more than 25 slides), and a selection of published articles about your work to:

Brooklyn Museum Library
Attn: Artists’ Book Collection
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052

Contact Information

Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives: (718) 501-6307
library@brooklynmuseum.org