The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced the winners of its 2011 National Medal for Museum and Library Service the other day — five libraries and five museums. They’re given for “extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions” and IMLS says “Recipients must demonstrate innovative approaches to public service and community outreach.”
I might not have noticed, except that one of this year’s winners, the Brooklyn Museum, sent out a press release, which prompted me to look at the entire list of winners. Since RCA is mostly concerned with museums, not libraries, and two awardees were children’s museums, only three were really of interest.
Brooklyn won for “welcom[ing] a widely diverse population of citizens who want to see, learn more about, and interact with the arts” and being “a national role model for innovative visitor engagement techniques.” It’s true that, while attendance there is not as robust as it should be (about 400,000 a year), the audience is more diverse and younger than at other museums. However, it’s worrisome to me that nearly 20% of those attending arrive on the museum’s 11 Target First Saturdays.
Still, this is a nice pat on the back for Arnold Lehman and the Brooklyn. As I’ve said before (many times), he’s trying.
The Erie Art Museum also won an award, for “excellence in providing traditional museum exhibit experiences” and for “reach[ing] beyond its doors to challenge the perception of what constitutes art and serve its community in innovative and inspiring ways.” I’ve not been there, but I have read about the museum’s charms, and I praised some of them last December, which you can see here.
Finally, there was a totally new institution to me — the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Collegeville, MN, which was founded “in 1965 in response to the destruction of manuscripts and books in European libraries during the two World Wars.” There, the Benedictine monks of Saint John’s Abbey
Using the latest technology available…created a microfilm collection for safekeeping against the possibility of another European war. Initially, the effort focused on preservation of western monastic manuscripts in Austria and Germany, but soon expanded throughout Europe to the Iberian Peninsula and south to Malta and Ethiopia. With escalating unrest in the Middle East, the museum began in 2003 to digitize manuscripts there. Started in Lebanon, the project quickly expanded to encompass Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and the Old City of Jerusalem. Today, library staff can be found working with their many partners anywhere in the world where rare books and manuscripts require protection from wars, political unrest, fraud, or even the well-meaning but sometimes damaging efforts at preservation by untrained volunteers.
A heroic effort. One might say the Hill is more a library than museum, but take a look at the exhibitions on its website. Plus, the other day, it gave a copy of the St. John’s Bible, a handwritten Bible it had commissioned — the first by a Benedictine monastery in the 500 years since the printing press was invented — to the Morgan Library.