The beautiful Phillips Library welcomes visitors and researchers.
Welcome to the Phillips Library, the research and documentation division of the Peabody Essex Museum. As one of New England’s older libraries, the library has an international reputation as a major resource for maritime history and art, New England life and culture, American decorative arts, Asian art and culture, Native American history and art, the art and culture of Oceania, natural history and genealogy.
The library provides researchers, curators, and the general public access to 400,000 printed volumes, over a mile in linear feet of manuscripts, and an extensive collection of ephemera, broadsides, pamphlets, and a substantial run of periodicals. Located in two architecturally noted structures, the John Tucker Daland House and Plummer Hall, the research facility provides wireless Internet access to all researchers.
What’s New
The Phillips Library will host an Art Museum Libraries Symposium on Thursday and Friday, September 23 and 24, 2010, to discuss issues of concern to museum professionals, art librarians and archivists working at art libraries in a museum setting. Topics of discussion include data unity, the role of libraries and archives in an art museum, fundraising and future trends relating to both. For more information please contact Andrew French at andrew_french@pem.org.
The historic collections currently housed in the Reading Room have been consolidated to provide ease of access for patrons visiting the Library. Although no historic materials were removed from the Reading Room, space opened to provide public access to Art Reference materials from three important art collections. These collections include the Vose Archives, a collection of American Art titles; the Herbert Offen Research Collection, a collection of titles related to Chinese gardens, art, and architecture; and books donated by Davida and Chester Herwitz, which include texts on Indian, European, Chinese, and modern American art. The Maritime Art collection, previously housed in the Reading Room, has been expanded to include texts relevant to The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes exhibit to open at the museum in June. A variety of art periodicals, including Afterimage, American Art Review, Aperture, Art India, and Arts of Asia, have also been brought into the Reading Room as have publications authored by museum curators.
These new collections are available to all patrons visiting the Reading Room. Additional art titles may be found in the catalog and paged for visitors, as is the case with the historic materials found in the collection.
We hope you will visit the Reading Room to enjoy the new collections now available to our patrons.
Onsite Library patrons now have access to JSTOR, an interdisciplinary digital archive of scholarly journals and selected monographs in humanities, social sciences, and science. Located on the library kiosks, patrons can utilize JSTOR to facilitate their research and print articles found or email PDF files to their personal email accounts.
Frank Cousins, known for his architectural studies, was one of Salem’s most famous photographers. Active in the early 1880s to the early 1920s, Cousins is known for his views of buildings and street blocks. To view a listing of images photographed on Salem streets View Frank Cousins’ Salem Streets Collection (PDF Format)
