Those collections will be housed in the new central branch space. The rest will come from closing two of the city's 87 branches: the very busy, but increasingly decrepit, mid-Manhattan lending library and the Science, Industry and Business Library. To help pay for project, which has been estimated at more than $300m, the city will contribute $100m. Now the plan is gaining momentum under Marx, who became president in July. "The off-site process could in theory reduce the number of those happy accidents," she said.įirst announced in 2008, the central library plan was sidelined by the tanking economy.
She's now planning to write an article on the artifact. You lose precious time."Ĭoutre recalled a recent serendipitous research moment in which she stumbled upon a 17th century political pamphlet she had never seen before in the library's collection. I've had problems in the past with lost orders or missing items. If you discover something near your deadline that you want to look at, it might as well not be there if it's going to take a week to get here."Īrt historian Jacquelyn Coutre, who was in the main reading room this week conducting post-doctoral research on the Dutch painter Jan Lievens, said: "The fact that you would need to plan ahead makes things difficult. "It will force me to plan ahead and request books. "When they move a part of the collection offsite, that slows things down," Caleb Crain, a fiction and nonfiction writer who has blogged on the topic, told the Guardian. They met with Marx on Thursday to discuss those concerns. "And we are as committed as the scholarly community to ensure that it continues to be a great research facility."īut some of scholars have bristled that moving a significant chunk of its five million research volumes off-site to make room for these changes will hamper their research.
"We are aiming to create the greatest library facility in the world," Anthony Marx, the library's CEO and president, told the Guardian. It will give a dramatically more modern look and feel for the system's central branch. The sleek new interior space – two city blocks long, eight storeys high and a quarter of a block wide – will come equipped with banks of new computers and, for the first time in two generations, a lending library. The library has said that the books in the stacks are showing signs of environmental wear and will be better preserved elsewhere.
The removal of the books – some to a site underground in adjacent Bryant Park, the rest to a facility in suburban New Jersey that the NYPL shares with Princeton and Columbia universities – is part of a gargantuan $300m reorganisation aimed at lugging the central library into the 21st century.Įight storeys of Carnegie steel stacks will be ripped from the central library building's interior to make room for a new public space designed by star architect Norman Foster, whose firm designed London's city hall and the reichstag in Berlin. The qualities which inspired the names of the two marble lions that guard the entrance, Patience and Fortitude, have been in little evidence. Researchers will still be able to access the books, but only after a wait of up to 24 hours.
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