In July 2000, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Brooklyn Museum a multi-year grant to enhance scholarly access to several historically significant archival collections through an integrated program of processing, database development, digitization, and encoding for internet distribution. The archival collections reflect the Museum's influence on the development of the several disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, architectural and art history, as well as ethnology. As a result of the grant, several new online resources are available. Finding aids for collections of curatorial records are available online and selected materials are now digitized and accessible on our website. These materials include images of cathedrals in Europe (1895–1914), views of archaeological sites in Bolivia and the Yucatan, and installation shots of Brooklyn Museum exhibitions from the 1930s on.

The Brooklyn Museum is grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the scholarly value of the research collections held in the Museum Libraries and Archives. In particular, we wish to thank Angelica Rudenstine for helping us to develop a plan to make these collections available for research. The staff would also like to thank technical consultants on the project: Richard Szary from Yale University; Barbara Eden at Cornell University; Susan Benz at the Brooklyn Public Library; and Elizabeth O'Keefe and Robert DeCandido at the Pierpont Morgan Library. We would also like to acknowledge the work of the Information Systems staff at the Brooklyn Museum.