Nominating Committee, February-August 1998

Of the various committees comprised of the individuals who serve on the museum's Board of Trustees, the only one for which d'Harnoncourt retained her files long term is the Nominating Committee, which by 2004 became the Committee of Trustees. The committee was charged with selecting for election potential members to the Board, the Executive Committee, and the Nominating Committee, as well as Trustee officers. D'Harnoncourt, along with other museum officers, participated on the committee at the invitation of its Trustee members. Committee folders include meeting agendas and minutes, planning memoranda and notes, as well as lists of current Trustees and study charts and other biographical descriptions of potential nominees, including press clippings. There is also a small amount of correspondence, primarily between d'Harnoncourt and committee chairman or potential nominees. Any files for the ad hoc and other standing committees are included in Series I. For the most part, departmental advisory committee materials are included in the corresponding departmental file.

The "General" files were transferred from Series I as they pertain to the general operation and business of the Board. The information offered is assorted, but minimal. In these, d'Harnoncourt's correspondence with individual Board members touches on issues such as their private art collections, museum activities, as well as the activities of the Trustees' business affiliations. Interoffice memoranda, press clippings and press releases concerning individual members are also included; as are contribution reports and other confidential Trustee donor profiles. [With the exception of the contribution reports, Series I contains similar documentation in files titled by the individual's name.] There are also a few letters with City Council members who, along with the mayor and governor, serve as Ex-Officio Trustees. Reference material consists of a few issues of museum Trusteeship, which is published by a professional association of the same name, and other general leadership articles. There is no general folder for 2006.

Of the subject files that follow, the most extensive are those documenting the events surrounding the Board's participation in a "routine check-up" of its "commitment to good governance, best practice, and self-improvement." Specifically, these are the subsets of folders entitled "Self-study survey" and "Retreat [2008]." These events would also be d'Harnoncourt's last and perhaps most significant collaboration with the Board before her untimely death. In 2007, the museum contracted two governance consultants, Richard Chait and Cathy Trower, to oversee this mission. Working with the Committee on Trustees, d'Harnoncourt and other executive staff, the consultants conducted a brief survey that helped them to devise a self-study survey that was distributed to the trustees. They also conducted more than a dozen interviews and observed three meetings. Documentation of these events comprises the "Self-study survey" files. "Committee on Trustees" files of the same time period also include related material. The consultants presented their findings at the Board of Trustee meeting of April 17, 2008. These findings, along with the consultants' recommendations for short- and long-term changes, then served as the focus of the Board of Trustees retreat held on May 20 of that year and orchestrated by Chait and Trower. That event is documented in the similarly titled folders. As d'Harnoncourt noted in a later email to the consultants, the retreat generated "lots of terrific Trustee response" and that she expected to participate in the follow-up meeting of the Committee on Trustees. That meeting was scheduled for the fifth of June. She died on the first.