MMA donated its Lending Library to the Historic Preservation Program at Eastern Michigan University in 2010. All of the titles are available via your local public library with a MELCat request.
Need some suggestions to get started? Check out these recommendations from former MMA Board Member Dan Truckey:
Making the Mummies Dance by Thomas Hoving
This is not a museum manual but memoir and one of the best -- period. The amazing thing is that though he is writing about the high-altitude world of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, many of the issues he faces are challenges that are faced by any museum director or curator. I teach this book in my Museum Studies class and it is by far my student’s favorite. It has great life experiences that can be useful to any museum professional or aspiring museum professional. As I tell my students, there are books that tell you how to run a museum and some that tell you how museums are actually run. This book would fall into the latter.
The Museum Experience by John Falk and Lynne Dierking
One of the standard texts for museum educators and exhibit curators, this book gives a fantastic perspective on how visitors use museums for both educational and social purposes. It also explores several “intelligence” factors that are very helpful for developing exhibitions and programs for not just different educational levels, but different types of intelligence.