El Tercer Brazo

Browsing the stacks…1,200 miles away

Posted by Steffen Böddeker

The Judd Foundation just launched a smart online catalogue of the artist Donald Judd’s personal library in Marfa, Texas. Representing the book holdings of an artist who was also an avid collector, writer, and designer of spaces and buildings, the interface is particularly valuable for visually revealing the inventory's idiosyncratic arrangement on the shelves.

The foundation's website itself is not new (and it shows), but the section for the Library browse tool is. On the Library page (found under the “Spaces” menu), photos of the shelves are displayed alongside the library’s floor plan; users select a section on the plan to view the corresponding shelf, as if standing in front. Moving the cursor over the photo reveals each shelf’s thematic, and clicking it opens a detailed view. From this detailed, single-shelf view it is possible to click on any book’s spine to open the individual record. I love this visual access to a collection entry. (For those not interested in the visual browse, a text-based search is possible.)

This interface is especially useful for such an exceptionally remote library with restricted access. But despite my enthusiasm for the concept, I hope that the project team hasn’t disbanded yet. So far the Judd Library Browse does an excellent job of satisfying curiosity, and it lands itself well to games of hide-and-seek – as Tyler Green already suggested on MAN. But there will be a limit to both the entertainment and the scholarship of getting to know Judd’s shelving logic from afar.

Missing still is the important next step of being able to pull the books off shelf and learn more about them. The textual material found in the record entries is frequently thin, and the cover images shown there are too small to be of any value. The direct link to WorldCat helps find alternative resources, but don’t send people away when they came to your site for a reason. Bringing those aspects up to speed is a matter of labor. But to take the project to a whole new level, imagine the possibilities of crossbreeding the place-specific browse of the Judd Library with the LACMA Reading Room's curated selections of searchable and downloadable individual books, and the Brooklyn Museum Catalogue's ability to cross-reference and share collection items.

Now on to the rest of the site...

Filed under // Judd Foundation catalogues online collections

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Required Reading

A small selection of LACMA catalogues has been digitized and made available in a very nice online interface called the Reading Room.

On line now is the first Reading Room selection entitled “Southern California Art of the 1960s and 1970s”, which includes ten exhibition catalogues of art from Southern California published between 1963 and 1981. They range from publications documenting one-person shows such as Edward Kienholz (59 pages) and Billy Al Bengston (69 pages, designed by Ed Ruscha) to the exhaustive A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (391 pages) and the slight Late Fifties at the Ferus (7 pages).

Once selected, a new window opens to display the scanned book. The menu allows you to view, zoom, and “leaf through” the books in different ways, as well as search for content (results give you the pages on which the search term is found), share (via email, facebook, twitter, delicious, google) and “take it to go” (download the PDF). That’s right: you can download out-of-print catalogues you probably should have read but couldn’t find in your local library or used bookstore. Time to catch up.

By making this material so easily available, the museum is serving itself and the reader. The Reading Room is a testament to the institution’s historical role and curatorial ambition (presumably future selections will also include more recent titles), taking full advantage of online tools to better disseminate LACMA’s vision. The benefits to the rest of us are obvious.

What more can I say; there is a new requirement for all museums: Copy the LACMA Reading Room.

Also see this related video with curator Stephanie Barron (who organized The Museum as Site: Sixteen Project the catalogue for which is also part of the Reading Room selection). The short, simple video adds a valuable sense of the catalogue’s physicality that is absent in the flat page scans.

Filed under // LACMA catalogues media museum website video

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Browsing the stacks…1,200 miles away

Required Reading