Excerpt about the collections:
The Thomas J. Watson Library is a world-renowned research collection with over 900,000 volumes. It is The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s central research library, and its mission is to support the research activities of the Museum staff; in addition, it serves an international community of scholars. Holdings reflect the Museum’s encyclopedic collections, with emphasis on European and American art, architecture, and decorative arts, ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Asian, and Islamic art, as well as an extensive collection of clippings and other ephemera relating to the Museum’s history.
The primary mission of the Watson Library Digitization Initiative is to expand access to the Library’s rare and unique materials by developing, supporting, and promoting a distinctive digital collection of these items.
The initiative will target materials that fall outside the parameters of other major digitization efforts, such as Google Books or the Internet Archive, and make them accessible to support the scholarly endeavors of Metropolitan Museum of Art staff and an international community of researchers.
Visit the Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries
