The Robert Goldwater Library
Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
The Robert Goldwater Library is a noncirculating research library dedicated to the documentation of the visual arts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Native and Precolumbian America. Part of the Museum’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, the library is open to adult researchers, including college and graduate students.
The Library collection comprises over 20,000 books published worldwide, with an additional 10,000 volumes of periodicals, including current subscriptions to 175 journals. Subject strengths include the art and material culture of West Africa, Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya (Indonesia), and Precolumbian Mexico and Peru, with extensive holdings in related disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. The library routinely collects exhibition and auction sales catalogs, as well as academic theses and dissertations.
Hours and Access
The Robert Goldwater Library is open to adult researchers.
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Telephone: (212) 570-3707
Fax: (212) 570-3879
Email: goldwater.library [at] metmuseum.org
Web Community
goldwaterlibrary.org
The Robert Goldwater Library Online Resource (known in house as “the blog”) is an interactive, online news and information resource. It is the brainchild of the Goldwater Library, the library to the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Like the library, its subject strengths include the art and material culture of West Africa, Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya (Indonesia), and Precolumbian Mexico and Peru, with extensive holdings in related disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. It also covers contemporary art in these regions, and issues broadly relating to libraries, museums, and online information resources.
The blog aims to serve up a combination of timely news and scuttlebutt as well as pointers to online resources of lasting research value. As both authorship and readership expand, we expect that the blog will see an even wider variety of postings — original reviews, think pieces, even audio and video feeds.
The blog is the natural outgrowth of the library’s longstanding tradition of providing reference services — what we do each day in the library, simply ‘repackaged’ and ‘repurposed’ to make it available to a much wider potential audience.
AAOA flickr group
The public photo pool is administered by the staff of The Robert Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it’s open to everyone.
We are looking for photos you have taken in our galleries documenting the collection and your experience visiting the galleries. Not only is the pool a great way to share your responses to the art on view, but it helps us identify works on display for the library’s readers who want to find out more about them.
The Goldwater Library wiki
The Goldwater Library wiki is a freely available online resource to comprehensive and authoritative scholarship on the traditional art and material culture of the Library’s core culture regions – sub-Saharan Africa, native and Precolumbian America, and the islands of the Pacific.
The primary focus is the understanding and interpretation the collection on display in the galleries. To that end the wiki hosts research guides to selected signature objects. Each guide includes links to Museum resources, such as the Collection Database and the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, and citations for published works on the communities and traditions that surround the object’s creation and use. A link to WATSONLINE accompanies each citation.
In addition the wiki directs visitors to bibliographies relating to departmental exhibitions; brief histories of the library and the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; and information on library policies and procedures.
