Student Name: Charles Kreloff
Course: LIS 698 Practicum & Seminar, Fall 2015
Instructor: Dr. Tula Giannini, Dean Pratt-SILS
Site Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Site Supervisor: Jennifer Tobias, Head of Library Services
Project Title: Internship at MoMA Library
This 12-week internship at MoMA’s library was my chance to get some practical experience working both in an art library and a museum. My specific duties were to get acquainted with the collection in the Manhattan and Queens locations by doing paging, (patron requests, which entailed pulling materials from the shelves, checking them out, and packaging), as well as re-shelving, labeling of new material, and shelf checking. The collection according to MoMA’s website: “… include[s] approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, and over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups” covering painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, architecture, design, performance, video, film, and emerging art forms from 1880 to the present. The entire non-circulating collection is accessible to both museum staff and the general public at the Library’s reading room in Manhattan and through their online catalog DADABASE. During the internship I conducted interviews with librarians, bibliographers, and cataloguers to understand the nature of their specific cataloging system. MoMA’s internship program is structured so that in addition to my library work, one day each week interns from every department participate in activities designed to increase understanding of the Museum’s various collections, exhibitions, and departments by meeting with curators, administrators, conservators and exhibition designers from throughout the museum.
The library’s main reading room at MoMA.
Practicum at the Museum of Modern Art 