Established in 1908, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology is one of the oldest and most extensive art libraries in America. It serves the Princeton University community and scholars from around the world, attracting more than 150,000 visitors each year. The noncirculating collection of some 500,000 volumes covers Western and Eastern art from antiquity to the present, and includes distinguished 15th- through 21st-century rare book holdings. Marquand supports research in the fine, decorative, and media arts, photography, architecture, and archaeology. The library acquires about 15,000 new titles each year, including books, exhibition catalogues, and journals in print and electronic formats, as well as image databases and videos.

Marquand Library was renovated and expanded in 2003, and now occupies 46,000 square feet on five floors of McCormick Hall. In addition to some 160 public seats—both table and lounge seating—there are more than one hundred private study carrels. Junior majors and regular patrons who do not have a carrel can apply for an assigned visiting scholar’s shelf.

The library is open weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 11:45 p.m., Saturdays 10:00 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., and Sundays noon to 11:45 p.m., with reduced hours during breaks. The rare book collection can be consulted weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Librarians are available for one-on-one research consultations or group instruction, and also provide assistance via email at marquand@princeton.edu. The library has an overhead scanner, book-edge and flat-bed scanners, regular and color printers, photocopiers, a microform scanner, and numerous public computers. For more information about Marquand’s collections and services, see the library’s website, marquand.princeton.edu.

The history of Princeton University and of the collecting of art for Princeton are deeply interwoven. Founded in 1882, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading university art museums in the country. From the founding gift of a collection of porcelain and pottery, the collections have grown to over 92,000 works of art that range from ancient to contemporary art and concentrate geographically on the Mediterranean regions, Western Europe, China, the United States, and Latin America.

The Museum offers a year-round schedule of special exhibitions, constantly changing displays of works from the Museum’s collections, internship opportunities, and a dynamic program of educational and social activities (particularly the Late Thursdays offerings).  Opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students also include becoming a Student Tour Guide and joining the Museum’s Student Advisory Board.

Student Tour Guides
Art Museum student tour guides give public highlights tours of the collection on Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. during the academic year. Tour guide training is provided as a one-week, intensive “boot camp” during Intersession in January. Training includes an in-depth exploration of the collections with curators, workshops on topics such as tour technique and visitor engagement, and a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Student tour guides commit to at least one highlights tour per semester and to meetings on the first Sunday of each month. No previous art history coursework is required, only an interest in art and interacting with the public.

Student Advisory Board
The Student Advisory Board is comprised of currently enrolled undergraduate Princeton University students, elected each winter. Board members assist with the planning of social events at the Art Museum, including the annual Student Gala in the fall, the Failed Love event in the winter, and Inspiration Night in the spring.

Object-Based Learning
Since the museum’s formal establishment in 1882, when it was cofounded alongside the University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, object-based teaching has been central to University teaching and to the life of the Museum.

The Museum hosts precepts led by professors from the Department of Art and Archaeology as well as a diverse range of departments University-wide, including the departments of Comparative Literature, Physics, History, English, African American Studies, Music, French, and Latin American Studies.

Each year, a team of curators, the director, and other members of the Museum’s staff teach a freshman seminar titled “Behind the Scenes: Inside the Princeton University Art Museum.” Here, students explore the role of the museum in the 21st century, ethical and policy issues such as cultural property ownership, collecting, the preservation of the past, and public engagement, as well as aspects of exhibition planning, from research and narrative development to loans and installations.

The Visual Resources Collection (207 McCormick Hall), which has existed since the end of the 19th century, holds extensive collections of digital images, 35mm slides, and photographic prints to support the department’s teaching curriculum and to provide image resources for study and research. More than 170,000 digital images from the department’s Visual Resources Collection are available in both the Almagest and ARTstor systems, which are accessible to the Princeton University community for teaching, research, and study purposes. Licensed image resources include ARTstor, offering more than 1,500,000 digital images, and Bridgeman Education, which has more than 500,000 images. Visual Resources holds the entire collections of Saskia and Archivision, more than 100,000 licensed images covering the history of art and architecture. A collection of about 600,000 slides is also available.

Visual Resources offers instruction sessions on image resources and use to faculty, graduate, and undergraduate users, and staff members are also available to help in finding, scanning, and using images. Scanning equipment for slides and flat materials is available for use in the Visual Resources facility. The Visual Resources web page includes tutorials for Almagest, ARTstor, and PowerPoint, along with information about image resources, copyright, and images for publications.   Photographic prints and other materials from the Princeton sponsored archaeological expeditions are housed in the Research Photographs area.

Research Photographs, part of the Visual Resources Collection, is a collection of photographs, negatives, and other documentation which forms an invaluable resource for researchers from the University community and around the world. Research Photographs holds primary source materials relating to expeditions and excavations conducted by Princeton University for more than one hundred years, including the 1932–39 excavations at Antioch.

The archive reflects the particular interests of department scholars, art-historical research by various members of the faculty, and general acquisitions made throughout the department’s history. One such collection is the late Professor Kurt Weitzmann’s study photographs of medieval manuscripts from many collections, as well as the images of the icons in the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai photographed during the Princeton-Michigan expeditions to Sinai. Study collections include architectural photographs by Wayne Andrews and James Austin, the A. Sheldon Pennoyer Collection documenting the damage and restoration of artistic works in Italy after World War II, and the Lo Archive of photographs of the Buddhist cave temples in Dunhuang, China. Materials from the collection are highlighted in exhibitions mounted in McCormick Hall and then made available online.

The Index of Christian Art, founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey, chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology, is a unique repository that is of considerable value to students of art history and related disciplines. The largest and most important archive of medieval art in the world, the Index offers unrivalled iconographic documentation, in both text and image, of art from the Early Christian period to the middle of the 16th century. There is a particular emphasis on art of the Western world, but this has been augmented in recent years by the addition of significant documentation of art from Coptic Egypt, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Syria, Armenia, and the Near East.

Works of art in seventeen different media are represented in the archive, including manuscripts, metalwork, sculpture, painting, glass, and ivory. The Index is currently available in both manual and electronic formats, with between one-third and one-half of the holdings available in the electronic database, which now contains nearly 100,000 work of art records, accompanied by more than 150,000 images. Nearly two thousand works of art are added to the archive every year. The Index also offers a small noncirculating library. Students and other visitors are particularly welcome to consult both the Index’s archive and its staff of specialists.

The P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art was established in 2001 to advance the understanding of East Asian art and culture. Located in McCormick Hall, with seminar and reading rooms in Marquand Library, the Tang Center encourages scholarly exchange by bringing together scholars, students, and the general public through interdisciplinary and innovative programs.

During the academic year, the Tang Center organizes public lectures, lecture series, workshops, and symposiums on East Asian art. Sponsoring as well as leading research projects, the Tang Center provides a venue and the support for both the beginning of projects, with an emphasis on research at Princeton and fieldwork, and the more completed stages, which often culminate in a publication. The Tang Center has pursued an active publication program, with scholarly volumes ranging in topic from Chinese Bronze Age archaeology to the issue of the family model in Chinese art and culture, commemorative landscape painting in China, Japanese art, and Chinese cinema. Tang Center books are distributed by Princeton University Press.

The Tang Center engages with graduate students on a variety of levels, including facilitating the biennial international graduate student symposium in East Asian art, sponsoring graduate student initiated workshops, and providing guidance and assistance with travel and research grants. In the arts, the Tang Center partners with the Princeton University Art Museum in the acquisition of works of art for the museum’s permanent collection, exhibitions such as “Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art” (2009), and related scholarly programs.

For more information about the Tang Center’s activities, please visit the Tang Center’s website.