Remington Museum setting up library

OGDENSBURG — According to Dagmar T. Jaunzems, a volunteer with the Frederic Remington Art Museum, setting up a library begins with a pile of books and some empty shelves.

Then comes the hard part.

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Jaunzems has been classifying and labeling books, magazines, exhibit catalogues and professional journals by and about the artist and the period to set up the museum's first reference library.

"We have scholars coming to the museum. They come from all over the world to do research, and sometimes they want to know what we have ahead of time," she said. "We probably have a larger collection of Remington materials than anywhere else in the north country."

According to museum Executive Director Edward A. LaVarnway, the materials, which have been both donated and purchased, have been accumulating during the years on random shelves and desks.

After 150 rare books and magazines were donated to the museum in October, he said, the museum needed to find a permanent place for the materials.

"They are in five or six locations at the museum. I've got a stack in my office and there are some in Parish Mansion and so on," Mr. LaVarnway said. "It's a huge project because the more we look, the more we find."

The library will be set up in a vacant room on the second floor of Kid's Place, 303 Washington St., and will be available by appointment. The database will be accessible by all computers at the museum.

Mrs. Jaunzems said she hopes to have the library open by late summer, but she will continue cataloguing books as they come in.

A former librarian and art teacher who has worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Calif., Mrs. Jaunzems is organizing the materials using the Library of Congress's classification system.

However, many books are first editions and have not been coded by the system yet. For these books, Mrs. Jaunzems must figure out where the publications fit into the different categories that are encoded in the labeling system, and the process is complicated, she said.

"What will be left out will be the weird ones, where I have to sort of scratch my head and say, 'Oh Lord, what do I do with this one?'" she said. "Of course, as we purchase books and they come in, there will always be books that are outstanding."