Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, March 15, 2013
«One hundred years ago this weekend, on March 17, 1913, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first painting by the French Post-Impressionist master Paul Cézanne. The Museum purchased Cézanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph at the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art, popularly known as the Armory Show.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, March 1, 2013
One hundred and forty years ago today, on March 1, 1873, The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed a lease for the Douglas Mansion, located at 128 West 14th Street in Manhattan. The rapidly expanding museum had outgrown its original location in the Dodworth Building in midtown and was in need of additional gallery space.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Monday, February 4, 2013
On Monday, February 4, 1963, a unique visitor entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art and remained in the building for the next three and a half weeks. Over one million people clamored to see her during her stay at the Museum, and the press reported extensively on her visit. To the great pleasure of the Metropolitan and its visitors, the Mona Lisa—perhaps the best known painting in the world—had come to the Museum as a loan from the Louvre.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Wednesday, January 16, 2013
On Friday, May 9, 1913, the ship La France steamed into New York Harbor carrying William Henry Riggs, a wealthy American and lifelong collector of arms and armor. Riggs was returning from France to his native city for the first time in over forty years in order to donate his impressive collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Wednesday, November 21, 2012
One hundred and thirty-seven years ago this weekend, on November 24, 1875, the American businessman and philanthropist William Backhouse Astor died. Just three years earlier, Astor had been responsible for a milestone in Metropolitan Museum of Art history: donating to the newly established institution its first work of art made by an American, the marble statue California by Hiram Powers.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, October 26, 2012
October 28, 2012, marks the centennial of the election of Edward S. Harkness as Trustee and Fellow for Life of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A lifelong philanthropist estimated to have donated one hundred million dollars to charity, Harkness spent twenty-eight years working on the Museum's behalf. A number of his gifts are among the most beloved and visited works of art within the Met's exhibition galleries.
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Anna Bernhard, Archives Assistant, Museum Archives
Posted: Tuesday, March 20, 2012
One hundred and forty years ago today, on March 20, 1872, the City of New York's Department of Public Parks designated the site between 79th and 84th Streets in Central Park for the future Metropolitan Museum of Art building.
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James Moske, Managing Archivist, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, February 17, 2012
One hundred and forty years ago, on February 20, 1872, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors to the public for the first time.
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Robyn Fleming, Assistant Museum Librarian, Thomas J. Watson Library; and Dan Lipcan, Assistant Museum Librarian, Thomas J. Watson Library
Posted: Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Museum Library, authorized by the Museum's 1870 charter and formally established in 1880, is one of the world's great collections of art historical research materials. However, thousands of printed books in the Library and other departments of the Museum are deteriorating rapidly through heavy use, acidic paper, or both. In some cases, important information has already been lost.
Over the past two years the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art has established a digitization program, with the dual goals of preserving these original printed materials and expanding access to their content. This post inaugurates a series of Now at the Met entries in which we'll highlight some of the interesting and valuable items we've decided to digitize.

Catalogue of engravings, etchings and mezzotints, belonging to James L. Claghorn of Philadelphia, and lent by him for exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 128 West 14th Street, New York, March, 1874 (Detail of page 5). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1874. 7 pages, 25 cm. Thomas J. Watson Library (NE57 .C6 1874)
Illustrated above is a page from an 1874 print exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and it's clear that we're close to losing forever some of the crucial details like artists' names and the titles of their works. Materials like these are historically important and frequently consulted, but will not be able to physically withstand much further use. If we only have a few turns through a physical object before it irreparably disintegrates, we want to make sure that one of those uses is for the scanner so we can preserve as much of the item and its information as possible.

A Library staff member scanning eighteenth-century fashion plates on the Zeutschel book scanner
Our process comprises three basic stages. We select the books and collections to be digitized; typically we look for items that are unique or rare, in the public domain, and not accessible elsewhere in digitized form. Next, we scan the items here in the library on our high-quality Zeutschel book scanner, illustrated above, or we send them to an outside vendor for scanning. Finally, we provide access to the digitized files using a software package that includes a public website and the option to index the full text of our items, thereby making vast amounts of previously unavailable content searchable.
We believe it is both important and in line with the Library's and the Museum's missions to digitize as many of the Museum's earliest and most ephemeral publications as possible.
To date, thanks to a dedicated group of interns, we have digitized more than 250 early Museum publications using our Zeutschel scanner. Most of these items relate to the Museum's collections and exhibitions, but we have also scanned publications on topics ranging from collection development and Museum policies to lecture programs to early versions of the constitution and by-laws.

Catalogue of the New York Centennial Loan Exhibition of Paintings, selected from the private art galleries, 1876 (Detail of cover). New York, 1876. 23 pages, 23 cm. Thomas J. Watson Library (N610.A53 M48 1870–76)
Shown above is a catalogue from the 1876 Centennial Loan Exhibition of Paintings. This exhibition, one of many celebratory events held throughout New York City and the country during that year, gathered together paintings and watercolors from preeminent galleries and private collectors in the area. According to the exhibition's organizers, the quality of the art in this exhibition had "never been surpassed on this continent."1
This digital collection of early Metropolitan Museum of Art publications will undoubtedly grow much larger as we identify more material; as of this writing, more than one hundred publications dating between 1870 and 1905 are in the final stages of scanning and will be available online soon. We are also working with Museum Archives to identify and include additional Museum publications not held by Watson Library. One of our ultimate goals is to compile the "digital library of record" for early Metropolitan Museum of Art publications.
The Thomas J. Watson Library has already digitized more than three thousand items both independently and in collaboration with Metropolitan Museum of Art curatorial departments as well as other art museum libraries and galleries. Together, these items represent a wealth of content for researchers to explore in order to further their knowledge of art history, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and its collections.
Related Link
Explore The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries' digital collections: http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm
[1] Catalogue of the New York Centennial Loan Exhibition of Paintings, selected from the private art galleries, 1876 (New York: s.n., 1876), Introduction.
Julie Tran Lê, Library Associate, The Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library
Posted: Tuesday, December 13, 2011
«Sixty-five years ago today, on December 13, 1946, The Costume Institute's first exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum opened to the public.
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