Museum Studies and Smithsoniana Collections

The collections formerly of the Museum Studies Research Library have now been encorporated into the main Natural History Library collections.

This includes more than 28,000 books, over 280 periodical titles and multi-media material in the areas of museum operations, museum organization, administration and management, and programs. When searching our catalog, these items will be listed with the location "Museum Studies Research Library" even though they are housed in the Natural History Library stacks.

A separate collection of historic and current Smithsonian publications, such as the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, is in the non-circulating "Smithsoniana" collection which is also housed in the Natural History Library. Many of the historical publications from this collection have been digitized and are available online in our Digital Library. More recent scholarly publications may be available through the Smithsonian Scholarly Press in OpenSI and articles written by Smithsonian staff before 2012 can be found in Smithsonian Research Online.