Enfilade

Happy National Library Week! From Rowman & Littlefield:

Amelia Nelson and Traci Timmons, eds., The New Art Museum Library (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1538135709 (eBook) $52 / ISBN: 978-1538135693 (hardback) $55.

The New Art Museum Library addresses the issues facing today’s art museum libraries through a series of scholarly essays written by top librarians in the field. In 2007, the publication, Art Museum Libraries and Librarianship, edited by Joan Benedetti, was the first to solely focus on the field of art museum librarianship. In the decade since then, many changes have occurred in the field—both technological and ideological—prompting the need for a follow-up publication. In addition to representing current thinking and practice, this new publication also addresses the need to clearly articulate and define the art museum library’s value within its institution. It documents the broad changes in the environment that art museum libraries now function within and to celebrate the many innovative initiatives that are flourishing in this new landscape.

Librarians working in art museum face unique challenges as museums redefine what object-based, visitor-centric learning looks like in the 21st century. These unique challenges mean that art museum libraries are developing new strategies and initiatives so that they can continue to thrive in this environment. The unique nature of these initiatives mean that they will be useful to librarians working in a wide range of special libraries, as well as more broadly in academic and public libraries. The New Art Museum Library is uniquely positioned to present new strategies and initiatives including digital art history initiatives, the new norms in art museum library staffing, and the public programing priorities that are core to many art museum libraries today.

Amelia Nelson is the head of library and archives at the Spencer Art Reference Library in The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. With a background in public services, information literacy, and digital initiatives she has published and presented on innovative topics like using VTS in information literacy classes and local artists’ files in contemporary art classes. In her own professional practice she believes in creating innovative projects that can be replicated and adapted to fit the needs of art libraries across the country. She is inspired by the innovative work that art libraries and archives have done to share unique resources in this rich information landscape and happy that these projects and initiatives can be shared with practitioners and those considering a career in art librarianship.

Traci E. Timmons is senior librarian at the Seattle Art Museum. In this role she manages all aspects of running two research libraries and a satellite library for the largest art museum in the Pacific Northwest: personnel management, acquisitions, cataloging, reference, research, digital collection development, maintaining and processing archives, artist files management, collection development, and grant writing. She has published on such diverse topics as early-printed books, special collections, artists’ books, classification theory, and user experience. She is passionate about the field of art librarianship, and specifically about its application in museums.

C O N T E N T S

Preface — Amelia Nelson (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) and Traci Timmons (Seattle Art Museum)

Introduction: The Art of Transformation — Kristen Regina (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Part I. Developing, Managing, and Caring for Collections
1  Shelved Out of Sight: Library Spaces and Archives Storage in Art Museums — Jenna Stout (Saint Louis Art Museum)
2  Cultivating Wisely: Strategies to Keep the Collection Alive and Evergreen — Doug Litts (Art Institute of Chicago)
3  Blood on the Walls, Blood on the Shelves: Decolonizing the Art Museum Library — Courtney Becks (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
4  Haptic Aesthetics: Artists’ Books in Art Museum Libraries — Anne Evenhaugen (Smithsonian Institution, American Art & Portrait Gallery Library) and Tony White (Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
5  Ephemeral Survival: Managing Physical and Digital Artist File Collections — Alexandra Reigle (Smithsonian Institution, American Art & Portrait Gallery Library) and Simon Underschultz (National Gallery of Australia)
6  Building Web Archive Collections in Art Museum Libraries — Sumitra Duncan (The Frick Collection/ New York Art Resources Consortium)
7  Preservation and Conservation for Art Museum Library Collections: Progressive Approaches and Evolving Concepts — Beth Morris (Independent Librarian, Preservation Specialist, Book Conservator, and Scholar)

Part II. Access, Outreach, and Collaboration
8  Prioritizing Special Collections in the Art Museum Library — Lee Ceperich (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)
9  The Life of the (Third-) Party (System): Integrated Library Systems and Discovery Layers — Dan Lipcan (Peabody Essex Museum)
10  Reconsidering the Reference Collection: Using Print Art Reference Materials as Training Tools — Gwen Mayhew (Canadian Centre for Architecture) and Annalise Welte (Getty Research Institute)
11  The State and Vision of Exhibitions in Art Museum Libraries — Carol Ng-He (San Jose State University)
12  Evolution & Revolution: New Approaches to Art Museum Library Programming — Janice Lea Lurie (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
13  Local Consortia and Museum Libraries: Partnering for the Future — Alba Fernandez-Keys (Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields)

Part III. Personnel in the Art Museum Library
14  Entering the Field: Resources for Aspiring Museum Librarians — Lauren Gottlieb-Miller (The Menil Collection)
15  Demonstrating the Value of the Art Museum Library through Strategic Volunteer and Intern Management — Traci E. Timmons (Seattle Art Museum)

Part IV. Digital Landscapes in the New Art Museum Library
16  Digital Art History and the Art Museum Library — Stephen J. Bury (The Frick Collection)
17  The Changing Ecologies of Museum Metadata Systems — Jonathan Lill (Museum of Modern Art)
18  Digitization and Contributions to Digital Repositories — Bryan Ricupero (University of Wyoming) and Sophie Jo Miller (University of Wyoming)
19  The Wikimedia Movement in the GLAM Sector — Sarah Osborne Bender (National Gallery of Art) and Carissa Pfeiffer (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center)
20  Getting a Seat at the Table: Art Museum Libraries as Open Access Stakeholders — Heather Saunders (The Cleveland Museum of Art)

About the Editors and the Contributors
Index

From Bloomsbury:

Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing: 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1635574586, $30.

A groundbreaking and endlessly surprising history of how artisans created America, from the nation’s origins to the present day.

At the center of the United States’ economic and social development, according to conventional wisdom, are industry and technology-while craftspeople and handmade objects are relegated to a bygone past. Renowned historian Glenn Adamson turns that narrative on its head in this innovative account, revealing makers’ central role in shaping America’s identity. Examine any phase of the nation’s struggle to define itself, and artisans are there—from the silversmith Paul Revere and the revolutionary carpenters and blacksmiths who hurled tea into Boston Harbor, to today’s ‘maker movement’, from Mother Jones to Rosie the Riveter, from Betsy Ross to Rosa Parks, from suffrage banners to the AIDS Quilt.

Adamson shows that craft has long been implicated in debates around equality, education, and class. Artisanship has often been a site of resistance for oppressed people, such as enslaved African-Americans whose skilled labor might confer hard-won agency under bondage, or the Native American makers who adapted traditional arts into statements of modernity. Theirs are among the array of memorable portraits of Americans both celebrated and unfamiliar in this richly peopled book. As Adamson argues, these artisans’ stories speak to our collective striving toward a more perfect union. From the beginning, America had to be-and still remains to be-crafted.

Glenn Adamson’s books include Fewer, Better Things, The Invention of Craft, and The Craft Reader. His writings have also been published in museum catalogues and in Art in America, Antiques, Frieze, and other periodicals. He was previously director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and has held appointments as Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and as Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  The Artisan Republic
2  A Self-Made Nation
3  Learn Trades or Die
4  A More Perfect Union
5  American
6  Making War
7  Declarations of Independence
8  Cut and Paste
9  Can Craft Save America?

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

From Stanford UP:

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1503615250, $35.

Philosopher, translator, novelist, art critic, and editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was one of the liveliest figures of the Enlightenment. But how might we delineate the contours of his diverse oeuvre, which, unlike the works of his contemporaries, Voltaire, Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, or Hume, is clearly characterized by a centrifugal dynamic? Taking Hegel’s fascinated irritation with Diderot’s work as a starting point, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores the question of this extraordinary intellectual’s place in the legacy of the eighteenth century. While Diderot shared most of the concerns typically attributed to his time, the ways in which he coped with them do not fully correspond to what we consider Enlightenment thought. Conjuring scenes from Diderot’s by turns turbulent and quiet life, offering close readings of several key books, and probing the motif of a tension between physical perception and conceptual experience, Gumbrecht demonstrates how Diderot belonged to a vivid intellectual periphery that included protagonists such as Lichtenberg, Goya, and Mozart. With this provocative and elegant work, he elaborates the existential preoccupations of this periphery, revealing the way they speak to us today.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. His books written in English include In 1926 (1998), Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012), After 1945 (Stanford, 2013), and Our Broad Present (2014).

From the University of Virginia Press:

Mattie Burkert, Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0813945958 (cloth), $95 / ISBN 978-0813945972 (ebook), $30 / ISBN 978-0813945965 (paper), $40.

In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England’s transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley, including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and genders.

Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive ‘theater-finance nexus’ at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to public life in eighteenth-century London.

Mattie Burkert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

It’s not schedule to be published until next spring, but pre-order sales will help fund production costs; and if you use the code WANSTEAD40 at checkout, you’ll receive a 40% discount. So, order now! From Historic England and Liverpool University Press:

Hannah Armstrong, Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1800856097, £45.

In c.1713, Sir Richard Child, heir to a mercantile fortune, commissioned Colen Campbell, to build Wanstead House, “one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe.” Campbell’s innovative classical façade was widely influential and sowed the seeds for English Palladianism. Its opulent interior by William Kent was equal to Kensington Palace and its extensive gardens were attributed to leading landscape designers George London and Humphry Repton. Wanstead’s glory days came to an end in 1822, when a major sale of its contents was arranged to pay off financial debts. Two years later the house was demolished, its building fabric dispersed far and wide. A large crater on an east London golf course is all that remains of this once ‘princely mansion’.

Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace provides the first illustrated history of the lost Georgian estate, charting the meteoric rise and fall of the Child dynasty. By restoring Wanstead’s reputation amongst the leading houses of the era, this book demonstrates that those lost in actuality, should by no means be lost to history.

Hannah Armstrong completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, having previously studied at the University of Glasgow, where she graduated with a Masters with Distinction in Decorative Arts and Design History. In 2012, Hannah Armstrong was awarded the Anne Christopherson Fellowship at the British Museum’s Prints and Drawings department. She lives in South West London.

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Note (added 25 March 2021) — The original posting did not include the discount code.