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December 2023 | Volume XLI, Issue 4 »

A Day in the Life of a Museum Librarian and Head of Library Collections

December 7, 2023
Gretchen Rings, Marie Louise Rosenthal Library of the Field Museum

Sobek the Spinosaurus greets visitors to the Field Museum.

I begin my day as Museum Librarian and Head of Library Collections at the Marie Louise Rosenthal Library of the Field Museum by entering the great Stanley Field Hall under a suspended Spinosaurus cast. The green oxidized metal doors have just been opened and early bird visitors are waiting inside. I take the staff elevator upstairs to the third floor where the Main Library is located. There are nine stack areas throughout the building next to their collection areas, e.g. the Birds Library is next to zoology colleagues who work with birds, an intentional design of the building when it opened in 1921.

The Library of the Field Museum opened alongside the rest of the Museum in 1894 at its first location, the site of the Palace of Fine Arts and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Its collection grew out of the transfer of books from the libraries of various departments of the World’s Columbian Exposition; materials brought to the Museum at this time included 1,400 titles from the Exposition’s Department of Ethnology and the 6,300-title geology collection of George Frederick Kunz, mineralogist and gemologist with Tiffany and Company. Today, the Library contains  approximately 275,000 circulating volumes and 7,500 rare books in its Rare Book Room. Photo Archives and Museum Archives are also under the Library’s umbrella. The Library primarily serves staff, volunteers, interns, visiting researchers, and members of the public by appointment. Through its participation in interlibrary loan programs, cooperative collection development, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and other digitization efforts, the Library seeks to expand access to its materials outside the boundaries of the Museum.

I started at the Field Museum in 2016 as the Reference & Interlibrary Loan Librarian. Prior to coming to the Museum, I worked in public libraries (Downers Grove and Oak Park) as well as university libraries (DePaul and University of Chicago). In each of these settings I provided reference services. That said, I almost didn’t apply for the Field Museum job because I assumed a lot of others would (and I was right!) and I wasn’t sure of my chances. After turning on the lights, computers, and opening the stacks, more staff start trickling in, including a new employee from Botany who wants to know if we’ve turned the page on the Audubon yet. I gather two other Library staff members to help me, get the keys, and wash and dry my hands thoroughly since I’m about to handle a book that is also one of the most valuable objects in all of the Museum’s collections. It takes three of us to open the glass case and position it to stay open. I then turn the pages of Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838) until landing on a gorgeous trumpeter swan. I encourage our visitor to get close so she can smell the book in its case and take a picture, too. Happily, I ended up in a job and in a place I’m really passionate about–the Field Museum has been my favorite museum since I moved to Chicago in 2005, and I’m always learning more about natural history, which I find fascinating.

Image of the Trumpeter Swan from Audubon’s Birds of America.

Later that morning we have a Library staff meeting attended by the new interim director of collections, where much of the conversation is about heating and cooling–always a challenge with such an old building–as well as recent unionization and organizational changes. Happily, the HVAC issues in the Rare Book Room have been rectified and I no longer need to empty a dehumidifier each day to keep it balanced. Afterwards I continue work on labels for a library exhibit on Japanese woodblock prints, which will be on display in three cases in the Reading Room. I send emails until three new hires of the Adler Planetarium’s library arrive for a lunch meeting in which we all get to know one another, exchange ideas, etc. They are all recently hired, whereas one of our staff has been at the Field Museum for 40 years, and a few have been here at least 30.

In the afternoon I send more emails and work on interlibrary loans, a holdover duty from when I was first hired as Reference and Interlibrary Loan Librarian in 2016. (I became Museum Librarian in 2019.) I send the first physical book that I’ve sent since prior to the pandemic, as well as four scanned article copies. I also send one follow-up email to a visiting researcher from the previous week regarding a symposium I am helping to organize on Berthold Laufer, the first curator of anthropology at the Museum. Near the end of the day I open up an unused office space under my purview that may be repurposed as a digitization space and discuss pros and cons with my supervisor. I check my calendar and emails for tomorrow, which will include a meeting with our network administrator about setting up a self-checkout station in the Fishes Library. It’s been a more complicated onboarding than I expected since I’ve been getting conflicting information from our ILS vendor and the self-checkout vendor. I send a question to HR on behalf of a staff member and then shut the lights of my office off before heading home after a productive day.