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.

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....

In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured....

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....

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....

A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.

Abandoned in a library book-drop slot in the dead of winter, the small kitten who came to be known as Dewey Readmore Books miraculously endured the coldest night of the year....

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....

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....

Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age....

Robert L. Wilkins tells the story of how his curiosity about why there wasn't a national museum dedicated to African American history and culture became an obsession....

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....

Information Science: The Basics provides an accessible introduction to the multifaceted field of Information Science (IS).

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

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

La polémica evacuación de sus obras maestras durante la guerra civil por el Gobierno de la República.

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

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

The remarkable, improbable story of a small, makeshift library in the Syrian town of Darayya, and the people who found hope and humanity in its books during the four-year siege they endured....

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....

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....

Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property....

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

A thoughtful meditation on the value of care and attention in an age of disappearing things, Fewer, Better Things invites us to reconnect with the physical world and its objects.

Scandal, shock, and rivalry all have negative connotations, don't they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin....