Team Spirit: Watson Volunteers and Interns Rally During COVID

“Need any assistance?” This was the thoughtful title of one of many emails we received last year from a beloved, long-standing Watson volunteer at the height of the pandemic. When the Museum and library closed their doors in March 2020, our volunteers began working remotely from home in the US and abroad—in locations ranging from Connecticut, Boston, Colorado, Palm Beach, and Wuhan, China. They stayed in close weekly contact through online video meetings, emails, texts, and welcome phone discussions for checking in on one another and keeping spirits raised. In a difficult and unexpected year, our team demonstrated remarkable resilience and collegiality during a difficult and unexpected year.

Suzanne Franks, a volunteer who has worked in acquisitions since 2002, reflects on her experience the last year: “The opportunity to continue working, albeit remotely, at Watson during these past months has been so meaningful. The long-distance projects we’ve been able to execute have enabled us to maintain strong ties to the real work of the library, and to feel that, in a small way, we are helping The Met fulfill its mission. It made life during the pandemic a little less solitary. Watson and The Met are playing an important role in New York’s recovery.”

Watson Library has an extraordinary team of thirty volunteers and four interns in acquisitions, book conservation, technical services, digitization, and systems. The below is a summary of important activities they performed this past year.

Maintaining our gifts program was a priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the greatest thanks to the readiness of the volunteers and interns in acquisitions, we were able to acknowledge several important generous donations. Interns Tomina Tang, Kai McGinn, and volunteers Gale Dickerson and Susan Appel—who is also a Friend of the Library—worked tirelessly during the pandemic to compile bibliographic lists of donations, determine value estimates, and prepare reports for the Museum’s Trustees.

As the team was not able to see the books in hand which were arriving onsite in the library, I provided photos of the spines and covers, which, with the aid of Worldcat, a global union catalog, allowed them to export the titles into neat bibliographic lists.

We are grateful to our donors for their generous gifts to Watson Library in 2020 and 2021. We are especially thankful to Pierre Apraxine for his gift of 330 monographs, exhibition catalogs, and periodicals on modern and contemporary fine art and photography including American, French, Haitian, Italian, Mexican, and Russian art, which the team assisted with.

We are also grateful to Tom Freudenheim for his gift of seventy-two monographs and exhibition catalogs on Judaica including artists of the Holocaust which our team of volunteers and interns assisted with remotely. In addition to receiving this important gift of titles, we also continued acquiring publications on Jewish art thanks to Kai and volunteer Laurence Kleinberg who helped to enhance our holdings, identifying thirty publications on artists of the Holocaust, which were recently added to our growing collection of over 130 titles in Watsonline on this subject.

We also received an important gift of thirty-three Latin American exhibition catalogs and monographs from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Susan Appel searched the original list from home, determining which books we did not already have and which we would add to the collection.

The acquisitions volunteers and interns also played an essential role in the African American Artist Project (AAAP), launched in June 2020 and managed by Jared Ash, associate Museum librarian, Slavic and special collections. This important initiative was designed to identify publications on African American artists not held by Watson, and to add them to the library’s already strong collection.

The African American Artists Project (AAAP) team is: Susan Appel, volunteer and Friend of Watson Library; Elizabeth Lizan, volunteer; Chuck Werner, volunteer and Friend of Watson Library; Suzanne Franks, volunteer; Elizabeth Schneider, volunteer and Friend of Watson Library; Jeanne Short, volunteer; and interns Kai and Tomina.

Our team worked steadily and industriously, and as a result, acquired over six hundred publications on African American artists. They were also key in compiling the Index of African American Artists represented in Watson’s collection.

The team also helped to identify galleries owned by Black artists and galleries representing African American artists, resulting in the donation of 125 print and digital catalogs to Watson Library.

Chuck Werner shares his recollections about the AAAP project: “It was challenging and informative. While I was familiar with some of the well known older and contemporary African American Artists, I learned about so many more artists and movements (in particular cities and areas) that I was not aware of. I also delighted in discovering newer artists from the Young Gifted and Black exhibition and other sources to add to the project. I continue to be on the lookout for new names. I should add that the project helped me to stay involved with Watson and to keep me engaged with a fascinating pursuit during the quarantine—i.e. to retain my sanity!”

To learn more about this project please read Jared Ash's post.

Within weeks after lockdown, the volunteer Contemporary Catalogs Team (CCT) was on a Zoom video call to discuss how we were going to maintain another priority project: developing our collection of contemporary gallery exhibition catalogs. Working with William Blueher, metadata and collections librarian and Tina Lidogoster, associate Museum librarian, in April 2020, we began a new initiative to add digital versions of gallery catalogs as PDF’s to Watsonline. As library staff were working from home, they could promptly catalog PDFs, and as digital publications, researchers from home could easily access them.

The CCT team of volunteers, Gale, Christine Mulholland, Elizabeth L., Elizabeth S., Jeanne Short, and interns, Kai and Tomina, identified over two hundred galleries to reach out to in over twenty countries, resulting in the addition of nearly two thousand PDF’s that were rapidly cataloged by librarians William Blueher, Melissa Raymond, Tamara Fultz, Tina Lidogoster, and Luxuan Liu. These new additions include donations from Erica Fiorentini Arte Contemporanea (Rome, Italy), G13 Gallery (Selangor, Malaysia), Galerie Lieve Hemel (Amsterdam), Knoll Galéria Budapest (Budapest), Galería de arte Rafael Pérez Hernando (Madrid), Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, (Paris), iPreciation (Singapore), Monique Meloche (NYC), and Tarq (Mumbai, India).

Elizabeth L. shares her experience this past year working on CCT: “The fact that Holly kept going forward kept us going. So happy CCT is continuing through.” Christine also expresses her heartfelt recollection: “I will be eternally grateful to Watson and the staff for keeping us connected and working during this past pandemic year. Our CCT group was a life preserver giving me access to work remotely and a wonderful sense that The Met was an ever-evolving beacon of artistic expression.”

Tina Lidogoster’s project capturing and cataloging digital auction sales catalogs available online is another exciting initiative which began during this challenging past year. Tina worked with Joanna Miller and Tom Foster, both volunteers and Friends of Watson, who together have cataloged over fourteen thousand print catalogs over the course of their volunteering. Once the pandemic brought us into lockdown mode, Joanna was happy to pivot from adding print auction catalogs to the digital format, cataloging 185 Bonham’s sales catalogs from home. We are grateful to Joanna and Tom for their steadfastness and dedication helping to maintain our online and print holdings of auction catalogs. Librarians William Blueher and Tamara Fultz also significantly contribute to the ongoing cataloging of this material, and former staff member Mia Ciallella helped out as well.

Book Conservation was ably assisted throughout the year by long-time volunteer Doris Straus, who is trained in hand bookbinding and conservation. We are fortunate that Doris assisted the project conservator, Sophia Kramer, to work on a selection of seventeenth through nineteenth-century anatomy books from the Department of Drawings and Prints. This project is funded through a conservation grant from the New York State Education Department.

Emily Schmidt and Vella Voynova were our Pratt School of Information fellows. They worked with Alan McCarthy Behler, associate Museum librarian, systems; William Blueher, metadata and collections librarian; Robyn Fleming, associate Museum librarian; and John Lindaman, associate Museum librarian, manager of technical services.

Emily and Vella contributed to a number of projects. Working remotely, they helped Robyn to assess which Met exhibitions had catalogs and if so whether the catalogs have been digitized, and if installation photography exists. The long-term goal is to add any missing content to the library’s Digital Collections and collate it together in Watsonline, the library’s catalog.

Working with Alan, Emily and Vella also reviewed the library pages on The Met’s website and added metadata descriptions and keywords to help increase our search results. As a result of their industrious work, there was an increase in pageviews (seen in the graph above), increasing access to learning about the collection.

Emily and Vella also worked with William Blueher, who oversees our social media platforms. They contributed dynamic Pinterest content throughout the year by browsing Watson’s digital collections and selecting material ranging from trade catalogs to Japanese illustrated books.

As we continue to look back on an incredible year, I am pleased to share additional recollections from our remarkable volunteer and intern team.

Tomina, our 2020 intern, who is currently a senior at New York University and has been working from Wuhan writes, “… It was very interesting, inspiring, and effective. I love the searching work I’ve done, and the tasks made me think more about books, art, and museums. Also, our weekly meetings have been very helpful and have always made my day.”

Kai, who recently graduated from Bryn Mawr College shares her experience as a library intern this year: “A day doesn’t go by without me thinking about how lucky I feel to be learning enormously through this dream internship... Though the 2020–2021 years come with unimaginable challenges, Watson and The Met community have shown me what 'adaptability' and 'dedication' really means, for which I am so grateful.”

And finally, Emma Guest, long standing acquisitions volunteer, imparts: “I miss going to Watson so much!... When the volunteers can come back to work, I’m going to be first in line!”

And we cannot wait for everyone’s return! We are so grateful to our volunteers and interns who have remained an active, spirited group supporting our many initiatives and projects throughout the past year, performing tasks expertly, remotely in impressively creative ways.

Special thanks to Kenneth Soehner, Sophia Alexandrov, Alan McCarthy Behler, William Blueher, Mindell Dubansky, Robyn Fleming, Sophia Kramer, Tina Lidogoster, John Lindaman, Emily Schmidt, and Vella Voynova for their invaluable assistance.