Situated at the center of the world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Libraries is a vital part of the research, exhibition, and educational enterprise of the Institution. Each Smithsonian scholar engages in an individual voyage of discovery using the artifacts and specimens of the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with the Libraries’ written and illustrated record of the past. The Libraries is uniquely positioned to help scholars understand the continuing vitality of this relationship, via exceptional research resources ranging from 13th-century manuscripts to electronic journals.
Category: Research
This post was written by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Head Librarian Anna Brooke.
Six students from the Corcoran College of Art + Design, Art and the Book Program, visited the Hirshhorn Museum on Friday November 8. Accompanied by Assistant Professor and book maker, Kerry McAleer-Keeler, and Pat Reid, Technical Services Associate for the Corcoran Library, the students examined 23 artists’ books from the Hirshhorn Museum Library’s collection which were on display in the board room.
This was written by Hirshhorn Library volunteer, Elena Grant.
In the summer of 2013, while preparing donated books for cataloging at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden library, we discovered an uncatalogued item—a 14 ½ by 11 ½-inch portfolio of reproductions titled 22 Selected Masterpieces: French Moderns, Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, USSR. The unfamiliar publisher name “Bookniga” and name of the long-extinct museum in the title attracted our attention. We decided to investigate the story behind this old publication.
You’ve been using Google for years. In fact, you use it every day. And you always get tons of results, so you must be an expert searcher, right? Not so fast… Getting more results is not always helpful! Do you really have time to go through 264 pages to find what you want?
What you need are better results, which come from better searches. So here are some tips that work in most search engines and research databases to help you get better, on-target results.
It’s not unusual for art and fashion to exist symbiotically, each providing inspiration for one another. Some artists, such as Andy Warhol, have become fashion icons both in the incorporation of their artworks into fashion designs, as well as their own fashion sense.
In case you missed the news last week, a Smithsonian scientist has identified a new mammal species, one that is particularly fuzzy and cute. Meet the olinguito!
We are pleased to tell you that the paper describing the species, first published in the open access journal ZooKeys, can be found in the Libraries’ Digital Repository .
A frequently overlooked service that librarians provide to their users is that of selection for collection development. From the universe of available books, this service determines which should be acquired for a particular collection. Reference and subject-specialist librarians pore over an increasing volume of new book announcements and publisher and dealer catalogs, picking out the best titles that are appropriate for purchase and addition to the collection they manage.
But like many things we librarians do, the Internet has changed the game.