Library & Museum Studies

An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality....

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm....

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture....

Flight is the hilarious and tragic story of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a charged search for his true identity....

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe.....

Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes....

A manifesto on the state of the non-profit arts sector and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity leaders have to redefine the business as an investment in our shared humanity.

The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people....

Look at the skills required for different types of positions, and how listeners aspiring to work in those positions can best prepare themselves to land their dream jobs and be successful in them....

Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. Annie Spence addresses those books directly....

The book that changed the conversation on the contemporary museum....

Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person....

Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life....

In December 2008, twentysomething Jill Grunenwald graduated with her master’s degree in library science, ready to start living her dream of becoming a librarian. But the economy had a different idea....

Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before.....

From a New York Times best-selling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world. A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia....

Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to recover heritage from museums across the country. Chip Colwell navigated firsthand questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists....

At first glance, Josh Hanagarne seems an improbable librarian. He stands 6'7", competes in strongman contests, and was diagnosed in high school with Tourette's syndrome....

From the author of the highly praised The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things comes another captivating history of the seemingly mundane: the book and its storage....

Over his 30-year career at Condé Nast, Nicholas Coleridge has witnessed it all. From the anxieties of the Princess of Wales to the blazing fury of Mohamed Al-Fayed, his story is also the story of the people who populate the glamorous world of glossy magazines....

Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information....

Competition for jobs is at an all-time high, with rivalry for positions coming from across the globe....

Py-Lieberman reflects on the profound connections between even outwardly dissimilar objects and offers insight and stories from Smithsonian experts.

In this audiobook, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata....