CAA News Today

Whether you’re researching ancient Egyptian art, provenance in Renaissance Italy, modern Latin American art, or contemporary artist’s books, three major New York–based institutions—the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, and the Brooklyn Museum—have joined forces to help you. The libraries and archives of these three museums recently launched Arcade, an online database that allows researchers worldwide to search their combined resources through a single interface.

Searches may be limited not only by library location—the MoMA library, for example, has two research sites in the city—but also by format specifications, including auction catalogues, artist’s books, primary-source and archival materials, and digital resources. For older users of these collections, Arcade provides specific searching using Dadabase (MoMA’s catalogue), FRESCO (Frick Research Catalog Online), and Brookmuse (the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives catalogue).

Other features include relevancy ranking of results, a searchable table-of-contents in thousands of records, book-jacket images, icons that identify categories of results, and links to Google Books files. RSS feeds provide up-to-date headlines of news in the art world. Featured lists present the collections in new ways. Links to recent acquisitions, finding aids, bibliographies, new digital collections, and library blogs are also offered in Arcade.