Arcade, a New Shared Catalog, Positions Three Major New York City Art Museum Libraries

More than 800,000 records representing the holdings of The Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art are now accessible via Arcade, a new catalog developed with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The catalog, at http://arcade.nyarc.org, unites the distinguished resources of each library into a virtual collection. Arcade is the gateway to a trove of rich and varied material, much of it unique, on art and cultural history spanning the spectrum from ancient Egypt to contemporary art. Exhibition and art collection catalogs, monographs, periodicals, rare books, photograph collections, artist and vertical files, auction sale catalogs, artists’ books, archival materials, digital resources, and specialized databases may now be easily located. “We are very pleased to have participated in the creation of this collaborative catalog, which promises to transform the nature of research services at these libraries,” comments Anne L. Poulet, Director of The Frick Collection. “Arcade facilitates discovery of our collections in new ways and allows collective development of ever more useful access and services.”

Arcade, based on the Millennium system from Innovative Interfaces, Inc., allows users to search all three libraries’ combined resources through a unified interface, while also providing collection-specific searching using Dadabase (MoMA’s catalog), FRESCO (Frick Research Catalog Online), or Brookmuse (the Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives catalog). Searches may be limited not only by location, but by format specifications, including auction catalogs, artist books, archival materials, and e-resources.