MoMA's DADABASE

New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in addition to its modern art and soaring admission prices, also houses an archive and library. The MoMA library, known simply as The Museum Library, is a collection devoted to modern and contemporary art, and documents the “painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, architecture, design, performance, video, film, and emerging art forms from 1880 to the present.” Its holdings include approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogues, 300 periodical subscriptions, and over 40,000 vertical files of announcements and ephemera about individual artists. If the pictures are to be believed, this collection additionally resides in gleaming white 2001-style cases. The Museum Library is open, by appointment, to researchers. “Elementary, secondary, and undergraduate students are advised to start their research at school and public libraries.”

MoMA also has its own archive, also open by appointment, and likewise known as The Museum Archives. Its archives were established in 1989; they “collect, organize, preserve, and make accessible documentation concerning the Museum’s art-historical and cultural role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The holdings include millions of historical institutional records, such as exhibition files; research papers and correspondence of former Museum curators, directors, staff, and trustees; newsclippings; and over 3,000 sound and video recordings of Museum events. In the photographic archives, there are tens of thousands of images of past exhibition installations, special events, the Museum's building and grounds, and works of art included in temporary exhibitions. Also included are photographic materials depicting artists and other personalities.

No real surprises thusfar. MoMA’s library and archive are perhaps what one expects of a large cultural institution.

Online, its tastefully-designed, and generally useful Research Resources pages interface in turn with the somewhat cutesy-ly named DADABASE, MoMA’s version of an OPAC. DADABASE includes records for all material of the Library, Museum Archives, and Study Centers: books, periodical titles, exhibition catalogues, auction catalogues, pamphlet files, special collections materials, and Web sites.

DADABASE was designed and implemented in 2001, and looks every bit of it. Despite its unprepossessing exterior, the interface is exceedingly clear about it what can do - search - and it does this job without fuss and without displaying an array of extraneous links (a major pet peeve of mine when it comes to OPAC interface design). Along with its search options (simple or advanced) and a menu for selecting other search options like keyword, title phrase, date, etc., it displayed little aside from a half-page of search hints. Again, this extensive search documentation may be a carry-over from a slightly earlier era of OPAC design, when such functionality may have been less familiar to the average research library user. None of the affordances of Web 2.0 around, needless to say. But, still, I found the interface’s Google-like minimalism, inadvertent or not, quite refreshing.

A sample search returns a list of titles. Selecting a title returns, in turn, a citation with hyperlinked author and subject headings. One also has the option of viewing the citation in raw MARC format. There is also the option of logging in as MoMA staff or as a visiting researcher, something I’d imagine might enable benefits like saved searches.

Its name is ridiculous, its design could stand a facelift, but DADABASE gets the job done.