The other week, having helped my daughter catalog a landmark sale of Native American items, I realized that my personal library on that subject was lacking. This happens a lot in the antiques world when you find yourself connecting to a new (or in this case an old) category of objects and need to catch up on your learning. For a collector, it means taking stock of your personal library and adding new titles. I will be honest and say that I usually hit eBay when it comes to obtaining used reference books, first, because I am looking for books to use and not necessarily signed first editions. Thus condition is not as big a deal to me. Second, exhibit catalogs often command crazy prices in the secondary market if the subject is particularly desirable. EBay can be that place to a find a bargain in a limited edition publication. So, I hit the auction site, and after about a half dozen offers made and accepted, I was looking forward to filling out my shelves. One thing that struck me, however, was that there were no books on my list published during the last decade. What I found were books from the 1990s and early 2000s published by my colleagues at various museums. But I could not find any catalogs from recent shows. I next jumped on ABE.com and went looking there. Nothing to see there either except for several recent Canadian museum catalogs. It then hit me: the realization that museums are not producing printed catalogs any longer. Back in the day, every museum wanted to have a catalog of its own collection. In many cases, those catalogs were the result of a lifetime of work by a curator or scholar. An example from my own career was Clarke Hess monumental Mennonite Arts book that we did when I was director of the Heritage Center of Lancaster County. It remains, in my opinion, the magnum opus on this topic. Another is the book Ute Indian Arts and Culture: From Prehistory to the New Millennium. I recall when first working with Native American objects, every collector advised me to get a copy of this book. When in doubt as to what tribe to attribute something to, go to the Ute. This was the mantra of many collectors who used this book like a Bible of the work of this important tribe whose arts reflect the work of numerous other tribal influences. So what happened to the next generation of books? Sadly, the changing nature of book consumerism has wiped out the publication program of so many museums. That is unfortunate, as a new generation of scholars will never get the opportunity to publish their findings in a way that future readers will be able to embrace and study. The use of books for researching antiques feels somedays to me to be rather old school. I watch my daughter and her colleagues in the auction business use online tools to identify and document objects. The phone is faster than a stack of books. But is it more accurate? That is the question. Much of what we do in the antiques world is built upon the subjective knowledge that years of studying things brings to us. No amount of internet images can replace handling and physically studying objects. I will miss the era of great museum catalogs and books, but I also know that they will never be fully replaced by a phone and a camera. Born to collect should be the motto of Peter Seiberts family. Raised in Central Pennsylvania, Seibert has been collecting and writing about antiques for more than three decades. By day, he is a museum director and has worked in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Virginia and New Mexico. In addition, he advises and consults with auction houses throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, particularly about American furniture and decorative arts. Seiberts writings include books on photography, American fraternal societies and paintings. He and his family are restoring a 1905 arts and crafts house filled with years worth of antique treasures found in shops, co-ops and at auctions.