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The Libraries and Archives are open to the public Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Additionally, we are open the first Saturday of every month from 1 to 4 p.m. with the exception of July through 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 phone (718) 501-6307.

Recent Blog Posts

Project CHART at the Brooklyn Museum
The Institute of Museum and Library Services has been an important supporter of several initiatives to make the Brooklyn Museum’s collection... read more.

Help us pin Brooklyn to the map!
If you know and love Brooklyn we need your help to get 300+ images from our collection pinned to Historypin's map before their launch on July 11... read more.

Skylar Fein and Abraham Lincoln: a look into Brooklyn’s collections
With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War it is a good moment to look back through time and how Americans have been depicted over... read more.

History Continues with the Cold War, Vietnam, and Early Apple Computer Kiosks
This is the final post in a tour through the Museum's historical exhibition press releases, taking us up to the 1980s. If you've enjoyed this peek... read more.

Press Releases from World War II and beyond
The previous post on the Museum's recently completed digitizing of historical exhibition press releases highlighted some excerpts from the 1920s... read more.

Read all Libraries and Archives blog posts

Project CHART at the Brooklyn Museum

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Deirdre Lawrence

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has been an important supporter of several initiatives to make the Brooklyn Museum’s collection much more accessible to a wider audience. One good example of this initiative is the M-LEAD Project which has brought 30 students from Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science to the Museum to train as interns in the Libraries, Archives and Digital Lab. The M-LEAD Project was funded by the IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program that supports projects to recruit students from diverse cultural backgrounds and to educate the next generation of librarians, archivists and digital managers. We was delighted to participate in this collaboration with Pratt Institute that allowed the Museum to be a training ground for their students.

We’ve now embarked on another project with Pratt Institute, also funded by IMLS, entitled CHART that is focused on digitizing historic photographs of Brooklyn. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), is a cross-institutional collaboration between Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Public Library and us. At the end of this 3-year grant funded project, Project CHART will provide online access to historical documentary photographs of Brooklyn that were previously only available on-site at each institution.

Views: U.S., Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Packer Institute. View 007: Packer - view from the garden in winter. Lantern slide, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, CHART_2011. (S10_21_US_Brooklyn_Brooklyn_Packer_Institute007.jpg)

You can follow along and see some of the images the Brooklyn Museum CHART interns have already scanned which are presented on the Museum’s website. We are uploading new images almost daily and eventually these images will be linked to others being digitized by the collaborating institutions.

We will be reporting on the progress of our CHART Project as it progresses. We hope that this project, already beneficial to the interns as a learning experience, will become a digital resource to the local, national and international research community and anyone else interested in the history and preservation of Brooklyn’s history.

About Deirdre Lawrence

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

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Help us pin Brooklyn to the map!

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Shelley Bernstein

If you know and love Brooklyn we need your help to get 300+ images from our collection pinned to Historypin’s map before their launch on July 11, 2011. If we don’t get cracking, Brooklyn is going to be woefully under-represented and that’s just not okay. Current Historypin totals have 1,358 images pinned to Manhattan with just 103 pinned to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, we can do better than that!

Historypin launches July 11 with our without Brooklyn. Let's rally BK pride to make sure the borough is well represented!

Historypin is a social sharing site meant to bridge the generation gap by encouraging its users to map historial images to modern day locations in order to show then and now comparisons and get people sharing more about history in the process. The site has been in beta for a year or so and we’ve been interested in participating, but we didn’t have enough hands around here to take some of our most interesting materials and get them onto the map because while they have been digitized, they’ve not been geotagged. That’s a major stumbling block and we need your help to get over this hump and ensure the borough of Brooklyn is well represented.

To get started we are going to begin a slow release of some amazing images of Brooklyn from the late 1800s to the Flickr Commons in the hopes that you can help us identify them and place them on a map.

In some cases, it will be very clear where these should be placed, but in others it will be a bit more of a mystery and require some sleuthing. Images that are geotagged by you will get placed on Historypin’s map for their launch on July 11 and we’ll be releasing more images every Tuesday and Thursday.

If you have a few minutes, help us out by mapping a few of these gems and you can continue to chart the project’s progress on our #mapBK leaderboard. Let’s represent!

About Shelley Bernstein

Shelley is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum where she works to further the Museum's community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, web-enabled comment books, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online. She is the initiator and community manager of the Museum's initiatives on the social web, she co-created 1stfans: a socially networked museum membership, organized Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition and Split Second: Indian Paintings. In 2010, Shelley was named one of the 40 Under 40 in Crain's New York Business and she's been featured in the New York Times. She can be found biking to work or driving '74 VW Super Beetle in Red Hook, Brooklyn with her dog Teddy. ::contact::

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Skylar Fein and Abraham Lincoln: a look into Brooklyn’s collections

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Deirdre Lawrence

With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War it is a good moment to look back through time and how Americans have been depicted over the years in both the objects we live with and through the popular press. Those of us who work here at the Brooklyn Museum are keenly aware of the depth and breadth of the encyclopedic collections that have been amassed over the years. Every once in a while we have the opportunity to dip into these collections and look for items that circle around a similar theme.

We just had that opportunity when Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, came looking for objects to support a small installation built around a wonderful new acquisition.

Skylar Fein (American, born 1968). Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase, 2010. Acrylic on plaster and wood , 68 x 44 in. (172.7 x 111.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, 2010.66. © Skylar Fein. Image: Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

The new work is entitled Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase by Skylar Fein acquired through a purchase gift from Stephanie Ingrassia (a Brooklyn Museum Board Member) and her husband Tim. As the Museum Librarian, I was delighted when Eugenie selected three items from the Library collection to be included in this installation. Here was a great way to showcase seldom seen rare items from the Library collection and we jumped at the chance!

I encourage you all to come see this interesting installation located in the Special Exhibition Gallery on the Fifth Floor of the Museum. In addition to the Skylar Fein, you will see a small carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad looking at a photo album in Matthew Brady’s studio. The image, dated Feb. 9, 1864, was widely published and distributed especially after Lincoln was assasinated in April 1865.

One of my favorite magazines in the Library collection is Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Included in the installation is an issue of Harper’s dated June 1865 opened to Abraham Lincoln at Home. The beautiful wood engraving is surrounded by interesting text and advertisements that reflect what was happening when the magazine was published.

Pages from Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Images Bywater Bros. Editions.

The third item from the Library collection is a more recent publication—an artists’ book entitled Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Davey’s book presents close-up photographs of pennies found in the street. Her images highlight the oxidation and degradation of the coins, contrasting the effects of their daily use as currency with the ideals embodied by the image of Lincoln. “Copperhead” is slang for a penny, but it also refers to the term used in the nineteenth century for Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and the policies of Lincoln’s administration.

There are many more objects to be seen including wonderful silhouettes from the Museum’s Decorative Arts collection and a Kara Walker entitled Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

This installation is visually and intellectually challenging as it shows how ideas and images have been communicated through time. A topic we can so easily build on through the extensive collections held here at the Brooklyn Museum!

About Deirdre Lawrence

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Filed under: Contemporary Art, Libraries & Archives, Newly on View
Tagged: collection
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History Continues with the Cold War, Vietnam, and Early Apple Computer Kiosks

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Anya Szykitka

This is the final post in a tour through the Museum’s historical exhibition press releases, taking us up to the 1980s. If you’ve enjoyed this peek into history, you’re encouraged to visit the Museum’s Exhibitions database, where you can browse by decade (among other search options). And make sure to check out the jpgs of the original releases, which are at the bottom of each entry.

U.S.S.R. Technical Books. Installation view. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Brooklyn Museum.

At the height of the Cold War, shortly after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S.S.R. Technical Books came to the Museum as part of an early Soviet-American cultural exchange program. It showcased Soviet science, industry, and medicine using manuals, textbooks, journals, and films, and included “documentaries on Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, thermonuclear research and new Soviet surgical techniques.” According to the release, the exhibition “cannot fail to promote understanding between the American and Soviet people.”

Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective. Installation view. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Paintings and Sculpture.

The political and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s—and the ensuing nostalgia for “small town America … of a bygone, happier time”—is alluded to in the 1972 release for Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, the first major exhibition of his original paintings. “Today, young America, of the long-haired, blue-jeaned Now generation, is discovering Norman Rockwell.”

Also during the early 1970s, the prolonged Vietnam War was starkly documented with an exhibition of work by nine photojournalists who were either killed or missing in action covering the war. The images in Viet Nam: A Photographic Essay “graphically depict the brutal face of war. Mounted without captions and numbered for identification purposes only, the pictures speak for themselves.”

Viet Nam: A Photographic Essay. Installation view. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

Using original plans drawn by John A. Roebling, historical and contemporary art works, and early digital technology, The Great East River Bridge: 1883-1983 celebrated the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge. “A computer program demonstrating the building of the bridge which has been created expressly for this exhibition by the Apple Computer Incorporat[ed], perpetuates the iconography of the bridge in modern day technology.” For more on this exhibition, including photos and essays from the catalogue, check out the Museum’s Research pages.

The Great East River Bridge installation

The Great East River Bridge: 1883-1983. Installation view. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Education.

About Anya Szykitka

Anya is an editorial assistant in Publications and Editorial Services, helping to maintain the Museum's web content. She has a background in publications and project administration with a focus on nonprofit organizations, the visual arts, environmental activism, and grantmaking. When not at the Museum, she does freelance newspaper writing and copyediting in her neighborhood of Williamsburg-Greenpoint, volunteers refurbishing bikes, plays guitar and violin, and looks after two rabbits.

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Press Releases from World War II and beyond

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Anya Szykitka

The previous post on the Museum’s recently completed digitizing of historical exhibition press releases highlighted some excerpts from the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s. There are many interesting releases from World War II and its aftermath—so many, in fact, that it was tough to choose which to include here. Hopefully this will whet your appetite for further exploration …

In 1943, the work of cartographer Richard Edes Harrison was exhibited in Maps For Global War, which included such maps as Pacific Arena and Southeast to Armageddon, described as “Hitler’s view of the Middle East.” The Museum felt the exhibition was timely “not only because of the importance of maps in the understanding of the current war, but also because of the many fallacies concerning geography now entertained by the average person.”

The same year, Museum visitors saw “the first comprehensive demonstration for the general public of what the properly and well dressed woman war worker wears.” The exhibition Women at War: Work Clothes for Women, included a “survey of safety headgear and shoes, underclothes, stockings and other accessories” and “cosmetics and coiffeurs for the woman in industry.”

UN Photo. General view of Know Your United Nations at the Brooklyn Museum. October 1947.

UN Photo. Eleanor Roosevelt attends the exhibition Know Your United Nations at the Brooklyn Museum. September 15, 1947.

Two short years after the war ended, photographs, charts, and informational text explained why “the U.N. is vital to every human being in the world.” It was hoped that the 1947 exhibition Know Your United Nations would “prove to be an antidote to discouragement and a powerful incentive to keep on going toward peace.”

Page from catalogue for Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, showing Olivetti electric calculator and portable typewriter.

In the early 1950s, the Museum mounted a major exhibition of contemporary Italian design to introduce Americans to “the spiritual and artistic resurgence achieved … by a nation which had been under a totalitarian yoke for decades.” Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, also showed “what our taxes, supporting democratic aspirations abroad, have begun to produce …”