Cataloging the Jean Outland Chrysler Library’s pamphlet collection may not yield the towering, visually satisfying stack of cataloged material that results from processing monographs, but the rewards and fascinating discoveries are the same. The library accessions (takes in) many art-related pamphlets, most from gallery exhibitions or sales. Unlike monographs, these pamphlets are often limited, one-off printings quickly produced for the length of the exhibition. Most don’t have an ISSN number or assigned Library of Congress call number and lack clearly identified authors and publishers. Furthermore, many of the exhibitions highlight a wide variety of art and one pamphlet may include anything from 19th century British oil paintings to bronzes from the 1970’s. Clearly, some pamphlets represent a cataloging challenge. For example, this past week I came across about 20 exhibition pamphlets from the now-defunct IBM Gallery in New York City. The pamphlets spanned the 1960’s and represented the gallery’s diverse lineup of shows and interests. Should I catalog each pamphlet by subject individually? Should I group them as serial publications? Are these pamphlets more valuable as an IBM Gallery collection? How could I offer subject-based access points to individual pamphlets without complicating our library catalog with so many individual records? Ultimately, I decided to catalog the pamphlets as a collection; initial access is available under the heading IBM Exhibition Catalogs, but users searching for individual titles or subjects will still turn up specific pamphlets related to their search terms. Hopefully, it’s a win-win situation.
These pamphlets are valuable as records of specific exhibitions, facilitating historical research in the broadest sense and sometimes offering insight into the provenance of individual pieces. And, of course, sometimes there’s cool stuff tucked into them! This week I found a copy of a paper by Prentiss Taylor, a noted artist and teacher of the Harlem Renaissance, titled “Art As Psycotherapy” and reprinted from a 1950 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Within the pamphlet was a Picasso postcard, newspaper clippings, and a letter to “Alice”. After briefly hoping I had found a long-lost letter to Alice Toklas, with whom he communicated, I’m now certain the letter is to Alice Jaffe, an art historian and Chrysler volunteer who specialized in Pre-Columbian art. The library has a portion of Ms. Jaffe’s papers and many of our books on Pre-Columbian art are courtesy of Alice Jaffe. Thanks to the knowledge of librarian Laura Christiansen and some poking through the Prentiss Taylor papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the mystery was solved. The letter alludes to the McCarthyism sweeping the country at the time, as well as fellow Harlem Renaissance figure Carl Van Vechten, and should be a nice addition to either the Alice Jaffe papers or the library’s Prentiss Taylor vertical file.

--John Curtis, Cataloging Fellow

This week I continued my efforts to catalog monographs and exhibition catalogs, but also tackled our shelf of un-cataloged wrapped books. While they present multiple challenges, the library’s wrapped books and folios offer exciting discoveries and the chance to physically connect with rare and older materials. Most of the wrapped books I’ve encountered were published in the late 19th and early 20th century and, because of extensive use, poor paper quality, or environmental conditions, many are showing signs of their age. We wrap these books in acid-free, archival-quality paper to help preserve their pages and keep them together (check out previous posts from interns Casey and Chelsea for an insider’s account of the process).

Wrapping is only the first step, however, in making these materials useful for library patrons and this week, in a scene reminiscent of Christmas morning, I’ve been unwrapping some of these treasures and adding them to the catalog. The cataloging challenge for wrapped books is two-fold: handling the brittle materials while searching for necessary information to create a robust catalog record and navigating the many foreign languages in which these books were printed. So far I’ve encountered German, French, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, and what is very likely Dutch. My limited Spanish vocabulary has thus far been sadly untested. However, with the combined efforts of library staff and interns and existing shared catalog records, I’ve been able to integrate these valuable materials into our collection.

Two interesting items of the week include one very large folio dedicated to architectural masters of the late 19th century and one very small catalog of an engraved powder collection at the Georgia Museum of Art. His Horn[e] Made: Engraved Powder Horns from the Collection of James E. Routh, Jr. highlights the often intricate and beautiful cravings found on the utilitarian powder horns carried by American frontier colonists. A Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White, 1879-1915, Volume 2 celebrates the work of a successful architecture firm around the turn of the century. As a recent resident of Boston, I was thrilled to see detailed drawings, floor plans, and even photographs of the beautiful McKim Building of the Boston Public Library. It was fascinating to see how McKim’s vision has withstood the test of time; many of the illustrations in the book reflect the look of the building today.

--John Curtis, Cataloging Fellow

A View from the Stacks : Interns' Journal - Week 2

Prior to beginning my internship at the Chrysler, I was told to be ready to “get my hands dirty” in the library. With my outsider’s knowledge of libraries and clichéd assumptions about internships I took this to be a metaphor for fixing someone’s coffee or sorting somebody’s mail. Upon starting my internship I was corrected in my assumptions—none of my tasks were menial or useless and “dirty” was meant literally. In the second week of our internship I and fellow intern, Casey, began the dusty work of library preservation with enclosing fragile and rare books in protective folders.

To begin, we donned protective gloves and looked at the 30 shelves of the Moses Myer’s family book collection with a certain level of awe—first over the age of each volume (some over 200 years old), and second over the sheer amount of time it would take ourselves and future students to fit and enclose each individually. Pausing often to study the books’ 18th century ideals of chemistry or the portraits and signatures doodled in margins, we measured each book for a 4-flap enclosure of archival paper. Over the first half of our preservation week we housed 34 books, protecting them from moisture, light, air, bugs, mold, and each-other. Though it felt great to complete our careful folding with a large chunk of the books protected, our next task certainly left a greater spatial impact.

In the latter half of our week Casey and I completed some lighter wrapping for a shelf of old and tattered books. After some organizing and dusting, we cleared 7 shelves previously covered in bits of aging books and German art periodicals to make light enclosures and some room for the museum’s scrapbooks. Previously crowded under shelves of auction catalogues, theses scrapbooks are now better preserved and more accessible to anyone looking for a visual history of the Chrysler museum, or just some amusing vintage photographs. All in all it feels great not only to accomplish so much, but to know and see how our work is serving the library. My week in learning the process and importance of library preservation has given me the valuable work experience I sought, as well as a feeling of achievement I had never expected.

 - Chelsea Reinhardt 2010 Summer Library Intern

A View From the Stacks: Interns' Journal - Week 1

Greetings from the Jean Outland Chrysler Library!

My name is Casey Nye and I’ve just started my summer internship and the Chrysler’s Library. I’m currently a rising senior at Virginia Tech majoring in Studio Art, Art History, and Communications. I’ve hoped for an opportunity like this to come my way, and am excited to work with professionals in the art world as I approach graduation.

Having been a frequenter of Virginia Tech’s Art and Architecture Library for the past three years, I thought the Chrysler Museum’s Jean Outland Chrysler Library would be the perfect fit for me. I didn’t know much about the library at first, but knowing that I plan to apply to graduate school for either Art History or Museum Studies, I thought I could gain valuable experience from this type of internship.

Our first day was, of course, a brief introduction to the museum staff and facilities. I met my supervisors, Laura and Sara, as well as other interns here at the Chrysler. After our introductions, we toured the museum, inside and out, and let me say, the public museum space is far less confusing than the building’s inner workings – I hardly have my bearings after one week! After being spun through the galleries, we dizzily headed to the library, which I hoped I would be able to find again on my own. Like I said, I didn’t know much about the library and had never visited.

The Library sits at the end of a hidden hallway off one of the galleries. It opens into a small reading room with general reference books, including a myriad of multivolume encyclopedias, dictionaries, museum catalogues, and trendy art publications, ranging from the Art Bulletin, to Paperweight Quarterly. Gazing at the number of shelves and shallow depth of material, I began to wonder about the whereabouts of all the actual art books. I thought, if I sit in this room of encyclopedias and dictionaries all summer, I will surely drive myself crazy! On the bright side, I would probably become a Jeopardy star. But just as I questioned my decision to spend my summer as a library intern, Laura took us through the STAFF ONLY entrance into the closed stacks, where all the scholarly published authors sitting on the shelves started to laugh in my face. My embarrassment set in. The Chrysler’s library holds over 110,000 items, including thousands of monographs, auction catalogues, folios, oversized books, rare books, and much more. How could I be so foolish as to think we would be working only with Webster’s Dictionaries! The small reading room is only a veneer hiding the enclosed treasures.

As the week progressed and I became more acquainted with the library’s collection, my initial skepticism seemed a distant memory and my fear of monotony turned to a fear of incompetence. There is much to learn from this secret library, and far more than I can hope to glean in a mere two months. So far, I have only seen a fraction of what this library has to offer, but I am certainly excited to explore cache of knowledge. The Jean Outland Chrysler Library is a hidden jewel within the walls of the Chrysler, and has taught me that you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

- Casey Nye,  2010 Summer Library Intern

Welcome, Summer 2010 Interns!

The staff of the Jean Outland Chrysler Library would like to bid a warm welcome to our Summer 2010 Interns! Casey Nye (Virginia Tech) and Chelsea Reinhardt (Old Dominion University) will spend the summer learning about the care and management of collections in special libraries. They will be helping with some exciting projects! As this photo shows, they are already hard at work on their first big project – working together to create archival 4-flap enclosures for the Myers family library. Updates on their progress and upcoming events, including the July 21st Jean Outland Chrysler Library Open House, will be posted here each week, so stay tuned!

A Fond Farewell

On May 31, 2010 the world lost a great artist. The death of Louise Bourgeois at the age of 98 marked the end of a long and art-filled life. Thought known best for her sculpture, Bourgeois learned to draw and paint at an early age. She began her adult life as a mathematics student at the Sorbonne – a subject she liked because its constancy helped her to temporarily forget a painful family life. She left to enroll in art school, and in 1938 married art historian and critic Robert Goldwater. The couple moved to New York City, and Bourgeois became part of the Student Art League. In 1981, she was honored with a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bourgeois continued to work until her death. Her life was marked by private pain that drove her creativity and gave her solace that came from expressing her emotions through her prolific creation of sculpture and image. She has left behind a legacy to be enjoyed by the world.
- SCM

Hello and Getting Started

Many thanks to the Jean Outland Chrysler Library staff for their welcome in the stacks and blogosphere! It may be cold in the stacks (for good reason) but my reception here at the Chrysler couldn’t have been warmer. Now that I’m settling in, it’s down to business. In my first two weeks I’m starting to tackle the backlog of unsorted and/or un-cataloged material, focusing on traditional art-related monographs. I’m sorting and identifying duplicates in the un-cataloged material and adding catalog records for those books we don’t have. In the coming weeks I’ll start working with smaller exhibition catalogs and pamphlets. Armed with coffee (tightly controlled and un-spilled) I’ll be getting as much material as possible to the shelves and into the catalog where it can searched, researched, and browsed.

Like many archivists and librarians, I face the continuing temptation to fully explore every book I catalog, sort, or work to preserve. In the interest of ever getting anything done, I can only occasionally indulge that urge. Each shelf or stack of un-cataloged material is a treasure trove of interesting material and, as in the case of a book I cataloged this week, that material can sometimes produce personal connections. I discovered and cataloged a book of photography by Joel-Peter Witkin (appropriately titled Joel-Peter Witkin), to whom I’m very distantly related through marriage. The book is dedicated to my second cousin, his wife at the time of printing. I’ve never met either my cousin or Mr. Witkin, but vividly recall a family gathering at which his work was discussed and uniformly criticized as being bizarre, disturbing, and in poor taste. My discovery of the book has not only sparked a shared memory, but also highlighted a challenge often faced by catalogers and the acquisitions staff of a library. Librarians often confront material fully within a collection’s scope which they find personally uninteresting, misguided, false, or even offensive. I don’t share my family’s sense of outrage at Witkin’s art, but personally think his work relies too much on staged grotesqueness as manifestation of his themes. Individual value judgments are unimportant, however, when wearing my cataloger’s cap and Joel-Peter Witkin will take its place beside Joel-Peter Witkin: Forty Photographs on our shelf. His books fall within the library’s collecting policy and, as a cataloger, I’m happily bound to the loftier Chrysler Library missions of fostering research and supporting the Museum’s collections.

Come back for more updates on my cataloging efforts. I’m looking forward to a successful summer!

--John Curtis, 2010 Jean Outland Chrysler Cataloging Fellow

2010 Cataloging Fellow - Welcome!

The staff of the Jean Outland Chrysler Library extends an enthusiastic welcome to 2010 Library Cataloging Fellow John Curtis! Established with the goal of enabling access to the Library’s unique resources while offering Masters of Library and Information Science students the opportunity to gain valuable experience, the Jean Outland Chrysler Library Cataloging Fellowship is made possible by funding from the Friends of the Library. John, a recent graduate of the M.L.I.S. program at Simmons College in Boston, MA is already hard at work cataloging materials that have previously been unavailable to Library patrons. We look forward to working with John this Summer. Keep an eye on the Library's blog for weekly updates about his work, new additions to the collection, and interesting items he comes across while cataloging!