This is my first post for my blog, The Art of Libraries. In this blog I will discuss the intersection between technology and libraries, particularly an art library (or special collections, rare books, something similar!).
My focus of studies is towards a career in art librarianship. From working in art and museum libraries back in Houston, Texas (where I am from) and my time interning at the Andy Warhol Museum's Archives and Pitt's Frick Fine Arts Library, I feel that art libraries are extremely hesitant about adopting new technology. Why is this? Is the issue with the librarians? The libraries themselves? Do art libraries feel as if the technology is not equipped to meet their unique needs? I imagine that it is a combination of all of those issues as well as issues I am currently unaware of.
In this blog I hope to pursue many of these issues.
I sign off with a classic Dutch Vanitas painting. Vanitas paintings, largely still life, were a style of painting that was popularized by seventeenth century Dutch artists (though other artists used the themes and the vanitas imagery is still incorporated in art today). Vanitas art reflected the themes of death and emptiness. I choose this image to close with because on multiple occasions when telling my family and friends I am in library school, they almost always remark, "Well aren't libraries going to be dead in 5-10 years!" I've never been able to answer as well as a vanitas.
Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and Writing Quill, 1628, Oil on Wood, 9 1/2 x 14 1/8 in. (24.1 x 35.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, Rogers Fund, 49.107
(Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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