OPINION




New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary's Papers
By PATRICIA COHEN

The archive of the drug guru Timothy Leary includes accounts of Allen Ginsburg's and Jack Kerouac's experiments with psilocybin.

Psilocybin[nb 1] (/ˌsɪləˈsaɪbɪn/SIL-ə-SY-bin) is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced by more than 200 species of mushrooms, collectively known as psilocybin mushrooms.



 

Book Details

• Hardcover
• June 2011
• ISBN 978-0-393-07810-7
• 9.5 × 12.4 in / 320 pages
• 
  
• Territory Rights: Worldwide

Coordinates: 40.75270°N 73.98180°W

New York Public Library
Established	1895
Location	New York, New York
Branches	87
Collection
Items collected	Gutenberg Bible
Size	52,946,398[1]
Access and use
Population served	19,378,102
Other information
Budget	$245,337,000[2]
Director	Ann Thornton[3] President and CEO, Anthony Marx[4]
Staff	3,147
Website	http://www.nypl.org/

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States, behind only the Library of Congress. It is an independently managed, nonprofit corporation operating with both private and public financing. The library has branches in the boroughs of Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island and it has affiliations with academic and professional libraries in the metropolitan area of New York State . The City of New York's other two boroughs, Brooklyn and Queens, are served by the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Borough Public Library, respectively. The branch libraries are open to the general public and consist of research libraries and circulating libraries.
The library originated in the 19th Century, and its founding and roots are the amalgamation of grass-roots libraries, social libraries of bibliophiles and the wealthy, and from philanthropy of the wealthiest Americans of their age.

Contents  [hide]  1History 1.1Founding 1.2Collection development 1.3Main branch building 1.4Other research branches 1.5Recent history 1.6Controversies 2Branch libraries 3Services 3.1ASK NYPL 3.2Website 3.2.1Controversies 4In popular culture 5Other New York City library systems 6See also 7References 8Further reading 9External links 10External links

[edit]History

[edit]Founding

At the behest of Joseph Cogswell, John Astor placed a codicil in his will to bequeath $400,000 for the creation of a public library.^[5] After Astor's death in 1848, the resulting board of trustees executed the will's conditions and constructed the Astor Library in 1854 in the East Village.^[6] The library created was a free, reference library, as its books were not permitted to circulate.^[7] By 1872, the Astor Library was a "major reference and research resource",^[8] but, “Popular it certainly is not, and, so greatly is it lacking in the essentials of a public library, that its stores might almost as well be under lock and key, for any access the masses of the people can get thereto.”^[9]
An act of the New York State Legislature incorporated the Lenox Library in 1870.^[10] The library was built on Fifth Avenue, between 70th and 71st street, in 1877 and to it, bibliophile and philanthropistJames Lenox donated a vast collection of his Americana, art works, manuscripts, and rare books,^[11] including the first Gutenberg Bible in the New World.^[8] At its inception, the library charged admission and did not permit physical access to any literary items.ref>^[12]
Former Governor of New York and presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden felt that a library with city-wide reach was required, and upon his death in 1886, he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune—about $2.4 million—to "establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York".^[8] This money would sit untouched in a trust for several years, until John Bigelow, a New York attorney, and trustee of the Tilden fortune, came up with an idea to merge two of the city's largest libraries.
Both the Astor and Lenox Libraries were struggling financially.^[8] Although New York City already had numerous libraries in the 19th century, almost all of them were privately funded and many charged admission or usage fees.^{[citation needed]} On May 23, 1895, Bigelow and representatives of the two libraries agreed to create "The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations". The plan was hailed as an example of private philanthropy for the public good.^[8] The newly established library consolidated with the grass-roots New York Free Circulating Library, in February 1901.^[13]
In March, Andrew Carnegie tentatively agreed to donate $5.2 million (presently, $1,452,672,000) to construct sixty-five branch libraries, with the requirement that they be maintained by the City of New York.^[14] The Brooklyn and Queens public library systems, which predated the consolidation of New York City eschewed the grants offered to them and did not join the NYPL system because they felt that they would not be treated equally with their Manhattan and Bronx counterparts.^{[citation needed]} Later in 1901 Carnegie formally signed a contract with the City of New York to transfer his donation to the city to then allow it to justify purchasing the land to house the libraries.^[15] The NYPL Board of trustees hired consultants, and then accepted their recommendation that a very limited amount of architectural firms be hired to build the Carnegie libraries so as to assure uniformity of appearance and to minimize cost. Consequently, the trustees hired McKim, Mead & White, Carrère and Hastings, and Walter Cook to design all the branch libraries.^[16]

[edit]Collection development

The famous New York author Washington Irving was a close friend of Astor for decades and helped the philanthropist design the Astor Library. Irving served as President of the library's Board of Trustees from 1848 until his death in 1859, shaping the libraries collecting policies with his strong sensibility regarding European intellectual life.^[17] Subsequently the Library hired nationally prominent experts to guide its collections policies; they reported directly to directors John Shaw Billings (who also developed the National Library of Medicine), Edwin H. Anderson, Harry Miller Lydenberg, Franklin F. Hopper, Ralph A. Beals, and Edward Freehafer (1954–70).^[18] The emphasized expertise, objectivity and a very broad world-wide range of knowledge in acquiring, preserving, organizing, and making available to the general population nearly 12 million books and 26.5 million additional items.^[19] The directors in turn reported to an elite board of trustees, chiefly elderly, well-educated, philanthropic, predominantly Protestant, upper-class white men with commanding positions in American society. They saw their role as protecting the library's autonomy from politicians as well as bestowing upon it status, resources, and prudent care.^[20]
Representative of many major decisions was the purchase in 1931 of the private library of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich (1847–1909), uncle of the last tsar. This was one of the largest acquisition of Russian books and photographic materials, and was made possible by the Soviet government's policy of selling its cultural collections abroad for gold.^[21]
The military made heavy use of the Library's map and book collections in the world wars. For example, the Map Division's chief Walter Ristow became head of the geography section of the War Department's New York Office of Military Intelligence from 1942 to 1945. Ristow and his staff discovered copied and loaned thousands of strategic, rare or unique maps to war agencies in need of information not available through other sources.^[22]

[edit]Main branch building

The organizers of the New York Public Library, wanting an imposing main branch, chose a central site available at the two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, then occupied by the no-longer-needed Croton Reservoir. Dr. John Shaw Billings, the first director of the library, created an initial design which became the basis of the new building (now known as the Schwarzman Building) on Fifth Avenue. Billings's plan called for a huge reading room on top of seven floors of bookstacks combined with a system that was designed to get books into the hands of library users as fast as possible.^[8] Following a competition among the city's most prominent architects, Carrère and Hastings was selected to design and construct the building.^[23] The cornerstone was laid in May 1902,^[24] and the building's completion was expected to be in three years.^{[citation needed]} In 1910, 75 miles (121 km) of shelves were installed, and it took a year to move and install the books that were in the Astor and Lenox libraries.^[8]
On May 23, 1911, the main branch of the New York Public Library was officially opened in a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft. After a dedication ceremony, the library was open to the general public that day.^[25] The library had cost $9 million to build and its collection consisted of more than 1,000,000 volumes.^[26] The library structure was a Beaux-Arts design and was the largest marble structure up to that time in the United States.^[27] It included two stone lions guarding the entrance were sculpted by E. C. Potter.^[28] Its main reading room was contemporaneously the largest of its kind in the world at 77 feet (23.5 m) wide by 295 feet (89.9 m) long, with 50 feet (15.2 m) high ceilings.^[24] It is lined with thousands of reference books on open shelves along the floor level and along the balcony. The New York Public Library instantly became one of the nation's largest libraries and a vital part of the intellectual life of America.^{[citation needed]} Dr. Henry Miller Lydenberg served as director between 1934–1941.^[29]
The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.^[30] Over the decades, the library system added branch libraries, and the research collection expanded until, by the 1970s, it was clear the collection eventually would outgrow the existing structure. In the 1980s the central research library added more than 125,000 square feet (12,000 m²) of space and literally miles of bookshelf space to its already vast storage capacity to make room for future acquisitions. This expansion required a major construction project in which Bryant Park, directly west of the library, was closed to the public and excavated. The new library facilities were built below ground level and the park was restored above it.
In the three decades before 2007, the building's interior was gradually renovated.^[27] On December 20, 2007, the library announced it would undertake a three-year, $50 million renovation of the building exterior, which has suffered damage from weathering and pollution.^[31] The renovation was completed on time, and on February 2, 2011 the refurbished facade was unveiled.^[32] The restoration design was overseen by Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., whose previous projects include the Metropolitan Museum of Art's limestone facades and the American Museum of Natural History, made of granite.^[33] These renovations were underwritten by a $100-million gift from philanthropist Stephen A. Schwarzman, whose name will be inscribed at the bottom of the columns which frame the building's entrances.^[34] Today the main reading room is equipped with computers with access to library collections and the Internet and docking facilities for laptops. There are special rooms for notable authors and scholars, many of whom have done important research and writing at the Library.^[8]

[edit]Other research branches

Even though the central research library on 42nd Street had expanded its capacity, in the 1990s the decision was made to remove that portion of the research collection devoted to science, technology, and business to a new location. The new location was the abandoned B. Altmandepartment store on 34th Street. In 1995, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the library, the $100 million Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL), designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates of Manhattan, finally opened to the public. Upon the creation of the SIBL, the central research library on 42nd Street was renamed the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.
Today there are four research libraries that comprise the NYPL's outstanding research library system which hold approximately 44,000,000 items. Total item holdings, including the collections of the Branch Libraries, are 50.6 million. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library on 42nd Street is still the heart of the NYPL's research library system but the SIBL, with approximately 2 million volumes and 60,000 periodicals, is quickly gaining greater prominence in the NYPL's research library system because of its up-to-date electronic resources available to the general public. The SIBL is the nation's largest public library devoted solely to science and business.^[35] The NYPL's two other research libraries are the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, located at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center. In addition to their reference collections, the Library for the Performing Arts and the SIBL also have circulating components that are administered by the NYPL's Branch Libraries system.

[edit]Recent history

Unlike most other libraries, such as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library was not created by government statute. From the earliest days of the New York Public Library, a tradition of partnership of city government with private philanthropy began, which continues to this day.^[8] As of 2010, the research libraries in the system are largely funded with private money, and the branch or circulating libraries are financed primarily with city government funds. Until 2009, the research and branch libraries operated almost entirely as separate systems, but that year various operations were merged. By early 2010, the NYPL staff had been reduced by about 16 percent, in part through the consolidations.^[36]
In 2010, as part of the consolidation program, the NYPL moved various back-office operations to the new Library Services Center building in Long Island City using a former warehouse renovated for $50 million. In the basement, a new, $2.3 million book sorter uses bar codes on library items to sort them for delivery to 132 branch libraries. At two-thirds the length of a football field, the machine is the largest of its kind in the world, according to library officials. Books located in one branch and requested from another go through the sorter, which cut the previous waiting time by at least a day. Together with 14 library employees, the machine can sort 7,500 items an hour (or 125 a minute). On the first floor of the Library Services Center is an ordering and cataloging office; on the second, the digital imaging department (formerly at the Main Branch building) and the manuscripts and archives division, where the air is kept cooler; on the third, the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation Division, with a staff of 10 (as of 2010) but designed for as many as 30 employees.^[36]
The NYPL maintains a force of NYC special patrolmen who provide security and protection to various libraries and NYPL special investigators who oversee security operations at the library facilities. These officials have on-duty arrest authority granted by NYS penal law; however, some library branches use contracted security guards for security.

[edit]Controversies

The contraction of services and collections has been a continuing source of controversy since 2004 when David Ferriero was named the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries.^[37] NYPL had engaged consultants Booz Allen Hamilton to survey the institution, and Ferriero endorsed the survey's report as a big step "in the process of reinventing the library".^[38] The consolidation program has resulted in the elimination of subjects such as the Asian and Middle East Division (formerly named Oriental Division) as well as the Slavic and Baltic Division.^[39]
A number of innovations in recent years have not been without detractors.
NYPL announced participation in the Google Books Library Project, which involves a series of agreements between Google and major international libraries through which a collection of its public domain books will be scanned in their entirety and made available for free to the public online.^[40] The negotiations between the two partners called for each to project guesses about ways that libraries are likely to expand in the future.^[41] According to the terms of the agreement, the data cannot be crawled or harvested by any other search engine; no downloading or redistribution is allowed. The partners and a wider community of research libraries can share the content.^[42]
The sale of the separately endowed former Donnell Library in mid-town has not been without its critics.^[43] The elimination of Donnell also meant the dissolution of children's, young adult and foreign language collections. The Donnell Media Center was also dismantled, with parts of its collections redistributed.^[44]
These changes have been justified as the road to new collaborations and new synergy,^[45] however, restructuring has meant that several veteran librarians with institutional memory have left and age-level specialists in the boroughs have been cut back.^[46]

[edit]Branch libraries

The New York Public Library system maintains its commitment to being a public lending library through its branch libraries in The Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, including the Mid-Manhattan Library, The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, the circulating collections of the Science, Industry and Business Library, and the circulating collections of the Library for the Performing Arts. The branch libraries comprise the third largest library in the United States.^[47] These circulating libraries offer a wide range of collections, programs, and services, including the renowned Picture Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library and the Media Center at Donnell.
Of its 82 branch libraries, 35 are in Manhattan, 34 are in the Bronx, and 12 are in Staten Island.
Currently, the New York Public Library consists of 87 libraries: four non-lending research libraries, four main lending libraries, a library for the blind and physically challenged, and 77 neighborhood branch libraries in the three boroughs served. All libraries in the NYPL system may be used free of charge by all visitors. As of 2010, the research collections contain 44,507,623 items (books, videotapes, maps, etc.). The Branch Libraries contain 8,438,775 items.^[48] Together the collections total nearly 53 million items, a number surpassed only by the Library of Congress and the British Library.
Taken as a whole the three library systems in the city have 209 branches with 63 million items in their collections.^[49]

[edit]Services

[edit]ASK NYPL

Since 1968 Telephone Reference has been an integral part of The New York Public Library's reference services, although it existed long before in a limited way. Now known as ASK NYPL,^[50] the service provides answers by phone and online via chat and e-mail 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. Library users can ask reference questions in Spanish and English and seek help at anytime through online chat via the Library's website. Through participation in an international cooperative, the Library receives support answering questions outside regular hours.
The service fulfilled nearly 70,000 requests for information in 2007. Inquiries range from the serious and life-changing (a New Orleans resident who lost his birth certificate in Katrina needing to know how to obtain a copy; turns out he was born in Brooklyn), to the fun or even off-the-wall (a short-story writer researching the history of Gorgonzola cheese). In 1992 a selection of unusual and entertaining questions and answers from ASK NYPL was the source for Book of Answers: The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service's Most Unusual and Entertaining Questions, a popular volume published by Fireside Books. National and international questioners have included scores of newspaper reporters, authors, celebrities, professors, secretaries, CEOs, and everyone in between.
In 2008 The New York Public Library's ASK NYPL reference service introduced two enhancements that improve and expand the service.
The Library recently launched 917-ASK-NYPL, a new easier to remember telephone number for Library information and for asking reference questions. Every day, except Sundays and holidays, between 9:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.EST/EDT, anyone, of any age, from anywhere in the world can telephone 917-275-6975 and ask a question. The library staff will not answer crossword or contest questions, do children's homework, or answer philosophical speculations.^[51]

[edit]Website

The New York Public Library website^[52] provides access to the library's catalogs, online collections and subscription databases, and has information about the library's free events, exhibitions, computer classes and English as a Second Language classes. The two online catalogs, LEO^[53] (which searches the circulating collections) and CATNYP^[54] (which searches the research collections) allow users to search the library's holdings of books, journals and other materials. The LEO system allows cardholders to request books from any branch and have them delivered to any branch.
The NYPL gives cardholders free access from home^[55] to thousands of current and historical magazines, newspapers, journals and reference books in subscription databases, including EBSCOhost,^[56] which contains full text of major magazines; full text of the New York Times^[57] (1995–present), Gale's Ready Reference Shelf^[58] which includes the Encyclopedia of Associations and periodical indexes, Books in Print;^[59] and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.^[60]
The NYPL Digital Gallery^[61] is a database of over 700,000 images digitized from the library's collections. The Digital Gallery was named one of Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites of 2005^[62] and Best Research Site of 2006^[63] by an international panel of museum professionals.
Other databases available only from within the library^[64] include Nature, IEEE and Wiley science journals, Wall Street Journal archives, and Factiva.

[edit]Controversies

A new NYPL strategy adopted in 2006 anticipated merging branch and research libraries into "One NYPL". The organizational change anticipated a unified online catalog for all the collections, as well as one card for both branch and research libraries.^[44]
Despite public relations' assurances, the 2009 website and online-catalog transition did not proceed smoothly, with patrons and staff equally at a loss for how to work effectively with the new system. Reassuring press releases followed the initial implementation, and notices were posted in branch and research libraries.^[65]

[edit]In popular culture

The historian David McCullough has described the New York Public Library as one of the five most important libraries in the United States, the others being the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, and the university libraries of Harvard and Yale.^{[66][verification needed]}

Film

• The NYPL has appeared in feature films. It serves as the backdrop for a central plot development in the 2002 film Spider-Man and a location in the 2004 apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. In the 1978 film, The Wiz, Dorothy and Toto stumble across it, one of its lions comes to life, and joins them on their journey out of Oz.
• It is also featured prominently in the 1984 film Ghostbusters with three of the titular protagonists encountering the ghost of a librarian named Eleanor Twitty, who becomes violent when approached. Her origins and the library's prominent standing are explored in the video game sequel, Ghostbusters: The Video Game. In May 2010, the library invited comedy group Improv Everywhere to put on a brief performance in the main reading room based on ghostbusters as a promotional stunt.^[67]
• Other films in which the library appears include 42nd Street (1933), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Chapter Two (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Regarding Henry (1991), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), The Time Machine (2002), and Sex and the City (2008).^[68]
• A thinly-disguised NYPL is the employer of a librarian with access to many mythical objects imparting magical powers for fighting evil in a series of films starring Noah Wyle. The first of the series is The Librarian: Quest for the Spear.

Television

• It was in the pilot episode of the ABC series Traveler as the Drexler Museum of Art.
• The animated television series Futurama has Fry confronting a giant brain there in the episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid".
• In an episode of Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) dates an NYPL librarian, Jerry Seinfeld is accosted by a library cop (Philip Baker Hall) for late fees, and George Costanza (Jason Alexander) encounters his high school gym teacher living homeless on the its steps.
• It is the setting for much of "The Persistence of Memory", the eleventh part of Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series.

Literature

• Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005) features a language researcher at NYPL who grapples with her past following the September 11, 2001, attacks.
• Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel Heir to the Glimmering World, set just prior to World War II, involves a refugee-scholar from Hitler's Germany researching the Karaite Jews at NYPL.
• In the 1996 novel Contest by Matthew Reilly, the NYPL is the setting for an intergalacticgladiatorial fight that results in the building's total destruction.
• In the 1984 murder mystery by Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys, an NYPL librarian stumbles on two dead bodies, c. 1930.
• In Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, the main character visits the NYPL to look up her condition in the dictionary.
• Allen Kurzweil's The Grand Complication is the story of an NYPL librarian whose research skills are put to work finding a missing museum object.
• Lawrence Blochman's 1942 mystery Death Walks in Marble Halls features a murder committed using a brass spindle from a catalog drawer.
• A lightly fictionalized portrait of the Jewish Division's first chief, Abraham Solomon Freidus, is found in a chapter of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).
• Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy (2009) is mainly centered around the library.

• Smaller mentions of the library can be found in:
  • Henry Sydnor Harrison's V.V.'s Eyes (1913)
  • P. G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress (1919)
  • Christopher Morley's short story "Owd Bob" in his humor book Mince Pie (1919)
  • James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)
  • Bernard Malamud's short story "The German Refugee" (in his Complete Stories [1997]; originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963)
  • Stephen King's Firestarter (1980)
  • B. J. Chute's The Good Woman (1986)
  • Sarah Schulman's Girls, Visions and Everything (1986)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumous Shadows on the Hudson (1998)

Poetry

Both branches and the central building have been immortalized in numerous poems, including:

• Richard Eberhart's "Reading Room, The New York Public Library" (in his Collected Poems, 1930–1986 [1988])
• Arthur Guiterman's "The Book Line; Rivington Street Branch, New York Public Library" (in his Ballads of Old New York [1920])
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Library Scene, Manhattan" (in his How to Paint Sunlight [2001])
• Muriel Rukeyser's "Nuns in the Wind" (in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser [2005])
• Paul Blackburn's "Graffiti" (in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn [1985])
• E.B. White's "Reading Room" (Poems and Sketches of E.B. White [1981])
• Susan Thomas'"New York Public Library" (the anthology American Diaspora [2001])
• Aaron Zeitlin's poem about going to the library, included in his 2-volume Ale lider un poemes [Complete Lyrics and Poems] (1967 and 1970)

Other

• Excerpts from several of the many memoirs and essays mentioning the New York Public Library are included in the anthology Reading Rooms (1991), including reminiscences by Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and Kate Simon.
• A replica of the library is also featured in Universal Studios Singapore and Universal Studios Florida

[edit]Other New York City library systems