Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

"The Future of the New York Public Library": A Longer Account

2012-05-24T15:25:39-07:00

Tuesday night's panel at the New School's Theresa Lang Forum on the future of the New York Public Library was lively and productive. In an earlier post, I gave a highlights reel; here I'll give a more in-depth account. (I'll be commenting liberally, but I'll try to confine my editorial commentary to notes in italics and in parentheses—like this one.)

Update: You can stream or download an audio recording of the panel here. And you can stream or download a video of the panel here. (The sound is a little better on the audio-only recording.)

The panel was hosted by n+1, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and the Institute for Public Knowledge. The moderator was Eric Banks, the president of the National Book Critics Circle. The panelists were as follows:

Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library;
Charles Petersen, an n+1 associate editor and author of "Lions in Winter";
Joan Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and the organizer of a petition to ask the NYPL to reconsider its Central Library Plan (CLP);
Robert Darnton, a historian who oversees Harvard's libraries and is the author of "In Defense of the New York Public Library";
David Nasaw, a professor of history at CUNY;
and Mark Alan Hewitt, an architect and the co-author of a two-volume study of the original builders of the NYPL's 42nd Street building.

Eric Banks began by outlining what is known about the Central Library Plan: It is a proposal to ship to New Jersey the 3 million books currently stored in the stacks underneath the 42nd Street building's Rose reading room, and in their place to install a new circulating library, which will replace the Mid-Manhattan Library (MML) across Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, now in disrepair. The functions of the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) would also be moved into the 42nd Street building.

Anthony Marx

Marx remarked that he had no interest in pitting the New York Public Library's two missions against each other—no interest in pitting the function of research against the function of the circulating libraries. He asserted, however, that the "the current status quo cannot be maintained and should not be maintaned," and said that the Central Library Plan was designed to address three problems: the decrepit condition of the Mid-Manhattan Library, where scaffolding had in fact been erected that morning to catch falling masonry; the unsafe preservation conditions for books currently stored in the stacks of the 42nd Street building; and declining levels of funding for curators and acquisitions.

He asserted that under the CLP, no part of the 42nd Street building currently open to the public would change, except for a wall near the coat check at the 42nd Street entrance, which would be knocked down, and a reconfiguration of rooms on the second floor that are currently unused. He said that access to the new circulating library would be through the 42nd Street entrance and perhaps also through the Bryant Park side of the building. He said that under the CLP the new building would remain open until 11pm. He said there were as yet no architectural plans or model, but that he would have something to show the public in September.

According to Marx, the estimated cost of the CLP is $300 million. The City of New York has promised $150 million, and the sale of MML and SIBL, four or five years from now, would generate more funds (the two buildings are widely reported to be worth about $100 million apiece). Marx said that the CLP would improve the library's bottom line by $12 to $15 million a year. This number has been given to the public before, but Marx broke it down a little: He said that $7 million a year would come from operational savings, which he promised to achieve without layoffs, and $5 million a year from new fundraising. (I've long suspected that the reason that the library has given this number as a range—for a long time it was given as "$10 million to $15 million a year," but it now seems to have shifted to "$12 million to $15 million a year"—was that a large component of it derived from new fundraising, the exact amount of which couldn't be known in advance. It's nice to have my hunch confirmed. For the record, the $7-million-a-year number was first reported by Petersen, in "Lions in Winter"; Petersen's source was David Offensend, the library's chief operating officer, who was in the audience Tuesday night. There's still much more that I would like to know about the $7-million-a-year figure. I'd like to know, for example, how much of the savings would come from closing SIBL and how much from closing MML.)

(A further note about the relationship between the endowment and annual spending—and about truth in advertising. By law, a non-profit is required to spend at least 5 percent of its endowment every year. If you add $100 million to your endowment, then you'll be spending an additional $5 million a year. The library's administrators sometimes describe the CLP's alleged improvement of their bottom line by $15 million a year as being "equivalent" to a $300 million addition to the endowment. They don't mean by this that the CLP will add $300 million to the endowment. They mean that some money will be added to the endowment, and some of the annual operating expenses will be lowered by consolidating three buildings into one, and that when you add the two factors together, you'll get an improvement in the annual budget of $15 million a year. What made the CLP so appealing, in its original presentation, is that it seemed to allow the library to eat its cake and have it, too: the administrators seemed able to spend $300 million and still "have" the "equivalent" of a $300 million addition to their endowment. It's important to understand that the word "have," in this way of speaking, doesn't meant what "have" usually means, and that the word "equivalent" is not the same as the word "real." In fact, as last night's disclosure reveals, the CLP savings from building consolidation are only estimated to be $7 million a year, which is "equivalent" only to a $140 million addition to the endowment. Of the $12 million a year that the administrators look forward to, the remaining $5 million a year is expected to come from raising a real $100 million for the endowment. So the origami is not as clever as originally advertised. In fact, when one looks with a more skeptical eye, the library seems to be proposing to spend $350 million for the sake of an endowment "equivalent" of just $140 million. Moreover, if $100 million can be raised for the CLP, the same amount can presumably also be raised for a different project just as inspiring—maybe even for a project that wouldn't damage the library's research mission.)

What will happen to the books at 42nd Street? Marx said that there are now about 3 million books in the stacks, 1.2 million in the Bryant Park Stack Extension (BPSE), and 300,000 to 400,000 stored elsewhere in the building. He said that 4 million volumes are now stored offiste. After the CLP, at least 2 million books would remain onsite, mostly in BPSE. (This is a much clearer way of counting the books than was used in some of the administrators' earlier public statements, which failed to count the storage in BPSE and elsewhere in the building in the "before" column but did count those storage spaces in the "after" column—a misleading presentation that has been reflected in a number of journalistic accounts. I'm glad that the library's administrators and publicists are now admitting candidly that they propose to lower the number of books onsite at 42nd Street from 5 million to 2 million.) Of the 3 million books to be moved offsite, Marx said that 1 million have been digitized, and 2 million have a "usage rate" of 2 percent. He claimed that 90 percent of books that have been used recently will stay onsite. BPSE has a second floor, currently unused, and Marx said that he was willing to consider outfitting it and thereby increasing the storage available onsite, but he was concerned about the cost.

In conclusion, Marx said that the Central Library Plan would improve everything that the library does.

Charles Petersen

According to Petersen, the library has been claiming that the CLP is far-sighted, offers the best option for all the library's stakeholders, and is required as a matter of economic necessity.

Petersen argued, however, that the CLP was shortsighted—reflective of a guess about the future likely to look dated very soon, much like the vision of a CD-ROM future around which the library planned the design of SIBL in the 1990s, now widely recognized as a costly mistake.

Petersen doubted that the CLP would serve all users well, and was skeptical of Marx's claim that 90 percent of the books requested would remain onsite. Petersen asked where the statistic had come from, and wondered whether consultants hired by the library had undertaken market segmentation analysis—that is, whether they had tried to find out how different subgroups of library users would fare under the CLP. Did the 90 percent figure apply only to the average visitor, who asks for a book or two? If so, Petersen asked, what's the comparable number for heavy researchers, who might ask for hundreds of books in a short span of time?

Finally, Petersen questioned that the CLP was really an economic necessity, or "tragic necessity," as he called it. He pointed out that although the acquisitions budget fell in 2010 to its lowest level since 1986, the money that the library spends on management and development has remained constant since 2000. Meanwhile, adjusted for inflation, the library's total spending has been greater in the 2000s than it was in the 1990s. "A lot of money is going into construction and renovations," said Petersen. He pointed out that in the library's projected budget improvement of $10 to $15 million a year, $5 million a year corresponded to new fundraising, which could be shifted to a different plan.

Petersen insisted that there were alternatives to the Central Library Plan. Although the library's administrators now estimate that renovating the Mid-Manhattan Library (MML) would cost $150 million, he noted that the New York State Division of Libraries estimated in 2010 that such a renovation would cost just $48 million. A decade ago, Gwathmey Siegel wrote up a plan not only to renovate MML but also to add eight floors, containing 117,000 square feet of new space; the price tag they came up with was just $120 million.

Petersen ended by calling for "a transitional plan for a transitional time."

Joan Wallach Scott

Scott noted that some supporters of the CLP have charged that critics of the plan are elitist and are opposed to democracy. As examples of this polarizing rhetoric, she quoted recent remarks by Howard Dodson in the New York Times and a Daily News editorial. Scott strongly disagreed with this characterization of the CLP's opponents. Scott said that critics of the CLP had no intention of keeping out the "unwashed masses," as Dodson called them. To the contrary, the CLP's critics, like most regular visitors the library's 42nd Street building, understood that the unwashed masses were already here, and looked forward to continuing to work beside them.

The real threat to the library's democratic mission, Scott charged, came from the reduction of the library's expert curatorial staff, who alone can make its treasures accessible to anyone who walks in the door. Scott quoted a recent essay in The American Conservative that urged the library's leaders not to confuse popularity with democracy. Democratic access to research, she concluded, is a "public good, not honored by a glitzy and overpriced reconstruction."

Robert Darnton

Darnton began by agreeing with the democratic mission of the library championed by Scott. He said that he was particularly sympathetic with freelance writers who needed public access to a research-level collection, because he had once been such a writer: he composed his first scholarly article in the 42nd Street building in 1964, during hours stolen from his day-job as a reporter for the New York Times.

He argued that the CLP was needed to remedy the decline in the library's spending on acquisitions, during a period when, contrary to rumor, the print book is very much flourishing. In fact, he noted, more print books are published every year, and the library needs to collect on both fronts, digital and analog. This inevitably leads to a problem of space. Recap, the library's storage facility in Princeton, is ten years old, and now contains about half its collections. Books there are supposed to arrive at 42nd Street within 24 hours, and Darnton said he believed critics were right to insist on that level of service. He also said that he believed that the second floor of the Bryant Park Stack Extension (BPSE) should be brought into use, and he estimated the cost of outfitting it at $15 to $20 million. (An earlier estimate by the library administration was $20 million.)

However, Darnton continued, even if the second floor of BPSE were opened, it would soon fill up. He listed several advantages to offsite storage: books could be ordered online in advance; technology now allowed for "digital browsing," that is, for looking at digital images of the spines and tables of contents of neighboring books on the shelf; and "scan and deliver" services can transmit small portions of books electronically. (Unfortunately, "digital browsing" would be of limited use at the New York Public Library, where for four decades or so, newly acquired books have been cataloged by size, not topic, in order to maximize storage space.) Darnton also noted that preservation conditions are better offsite. In the stacks at 42nd Street, the average temperature is 74 degrees Fahrenheit, but it can soar into the eighties. Darnton agreed with Nicholson Baker that the threat to paper has often been exaggerated by librarians, but he noted that the temperature in the Recap facility is a steady 55 degrees. The per-book cost of storage at Recap is half of the cost in BPSE, and Darnton didn't think that removal of 3 million books from 42nd Street would inconvenience anyone.

Darnton took issue with critics who alleged that the CLP would turn the 42nd Street building into an "internet café." He conceded, though, that claims by supporters that the CLP would be more democratic were "misleading." He took issue with Petersen's charge that the trustees had guessed the future and were making a risky bet on the e-book. "We are not trying to predict the future now," Darnton said. "We are trying to meet our commitments in the present."

David Nasaw

Nasaw noted that he teaches at CUNY, which depends on the NYPL as a research library—a dependence that the state legislature recognizes by giving the library $1.1 million a year. "Now we're being told," Nasaw said, "that the only way to save the library is to rip out its innards." To supporters of the CLP who pointed out that offsite storage had been going on for a decade already, he answered, "That's what frightens us." He didn't think the administrators could plausibly claim that service would improve. Was traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike suddenly going to decrease? He wouldn't believe the library's claims unless he was given many specifics, down to the details of the van schedules. "If it's going to work tomorrow, why doesn't it work today?"

Nasaw said that he was too much a New Yorker to believe in conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, he was enough of a New Yorker to know how deals are usually made here, and, he said, "I would not be shocked if the voices speaking loudest" in favor of the CLP are in real estate. He called the CLP "fatally flawed," and said "This boat don't float." He called it a feast for the circulating side of the library's mission, with a few scraps for the research side. "We have no assurance that these savings are ever going to add up," he said of the hoped-for budgetary improvements, "or that they'll go to the research budget."

Nasaw insisted, however, that the president and staff of the library are "not our enemies." Their good faith was proved by the fact that they had come to this event, and that they had invited onto an advisory panel people like him who they knew would not roll over. He disagreed with the notion that statistical models could show that it was safe to move a book offsite, saying that "If a book is only read once every fifty years, it needs to be there" when the scholar in search of it arrives.

Mark Alan Hewitt

When the 42nd Street building was completed in 1911, Hewitt said, it was considered a marvel, centered around a new piece of technology: the elevator. The librarian John Shaw Billings, after a tour of the world's best libraries, came up with the idea of putting the reading room on top of the stacks, and as a preservationist, Hewitt felt that the stacks ought to be first on the list of what to landmark in the building. He considered them as important to the library, architecturally, as the steel train sheds were to the old Penn Station. Because of the sturdiness of their construction, Hewitt thought it would take an "engineering marvel" to dismantle them. For their day, they were considered fire-resistant, because closely packed books were expected to burn slowly, like timber, allowing fire rescue teams to put fires out before they could spread.

As an architect, Hewitt didn't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to put people into a space designed for books, and pointed out that the space now occupied by the stacks would be hard to illuminate, and hard to heat and cool in a way humans would find comfortable. Why not fit a circulating library into existing unused space in the 42nd Street building? Hewitt asked.

When the library was first built, its architects underestimated the cost of demolishing the Croton Reservoir that stood on the site. Demolition ended up costing as much as the rest of construction, and Hewitt wondered if the library's new architects would also be surprised by the cost of demolition, which would be extremely complex. To name just one small challenge: Where would the debris chute go? So rugged are the stacks, Hewitt asserted, that if the NYPL were bombed tomorrow, the stacks would remain standing while the marble building around them crumbled.

Why sacrifice this piece of history? Hewitt asked. He called the CLP "a mistake that New Yorkers will regret for generations."

Q&A

A few scattered notes:

Marx said, "I will commit to the majority of the $15 million being used for librarians and for collections."

Petersen called for the library to release detailed analyses of the other plans it had explored. He pointed out that for the cost of the CLP, the library could build seven Bronx Library Centers.

Marx said that he was concerned about losing the $150 million that the City of New York had promised to the library for the CLP. He admitted, though, that it was "conceivable" that the city might not withdraw the money if the library asked to modify its plans.

In response to a questioner who identified herself as a former librarian and asked about the gag orders that departing staffers must sign in order to receive their severance packages, Marx said, "The library does use severance agreements with employees under certain circumstances. As I understand it, these agreements are standard operating procedure. They are not meant to prevent staff from talking about issues of public concern, like this," i.e., like the CLP. He called the CLP a "staff-driven plan," and said that he had told his staff that "they can say anything critical." He has even invited staff members to write to him anonymously, if they feel the need to.

Petersen stressed that the library's plan was radical and pointed out that no other major research library has shipped such an overwhelming majority of its books offsite. The Library of Congress, for example, keeps only 3 million of its 34 million books offsite, and the proportion offsite at Yale and the University of California, Berkely, are also low. Petersen asked Darnton why he didn't take the stacks out of Widener, the core of the Harvard library system that Darnton oversees. "We're not about to take the stacks out of Widener," Darnton answered. "Why do it to NYPL if you won't do it to Widener?" Petersen replied.

There were many other questions, many quite important, but my note-taking capacity flagged toward the end of the evening; my apologies.

"The Future of the New York Public Library": Highlights from the Panel Discussion

2012-05-23T09:22:47-07:00

Last night I attended a panel at the New School's Theresa Lang Forum on the future of the New York Public Library, hosted by n+1, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and the Institute for Public Knowledge. It was a lively discussion, which brought a number of new facts about the NYPL's Central Library Plan (CLP) onto the public record and suggested several new angles for viewing it. All seats inside the forum were occupied, and I learned this morning that the guards were adhering strictly to fire codes and turned away latecomers.

For those who were turned away, I'll write a longish account on this blog shortly. For skimmers, though, here's what was new to me (this will be a little inside-baseball; I'll try to explain more carefully in the longer post that follows):

Until recently, the library's publicists have claimed that the CLP will improve the library's annual budget by $12 to $15 million while refusing to break the number down. NYPL president Anthony Marx conceded last night that $5 million of that $12 to $15 million a year is in fact expected to come from $100 million of new fundraising. The savings from consolidation per se are estimated to be only $7 million a year. (Note: There's still a lot more I'd like to know more about the specifics of where those savings are supposed to come from.)
The library's publicists claim that a standalone renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Library would cost $150 million, but Charles Petersen suggested last night that the number might be overblown. He reported that in 2010 New York State's Division of Library Development estimated the cost as $48 million. He also reported that a decade ago Gwathmey Siegel developed a plan to renovate the Mid-Manhattan and add eight stories, and at the time estimated the cost of the combined renovation and expansion as $120 million.
Robert Darnton, though a supporter of the CLP, believes that the second floor of the Bryant Park Stack Extension, currently empty, should be outfitted and used to store books.
Architectural historian Mark Alan Hewitt suggested that dismantling the seven stories of bookshelves under the Rose reading room would require "an engineering marvel" and said that he worries that the library's estimates of the cost and difficulty of demolition may be far too low. "If the New York Public Library were bombed tomorrow," he said, "the stacks would remain standing."
The City of New York has offered to give the library $150 million toward the CLP. Marx suggested that the library should do nothing to jeopardize the grant, but he admitted that it's "conceivable" that the City of New York could let the New York Public Library change the CLP.
In the Q&A period, when a longtime NYPL employee asked about the nondisparagement agreements that the library obliges many retirees to sign in order to receive their severance packages, Marx asserted that "They are not meant to prevent staff from talking about issues of public concern," and he then named the controversy over the CLP as the sort of public issue that they were free to talk about. (In my opinion, this could be the biggest news of the evening, because—please consult your lawyers first—it could free former library staff to discuss candidly with the press their assessments of the Central Library Plan.) Or maybe not. Please see below, for an update.
Petersen noted that no other major research library has taken the radical step the New York Public Library is contemplating: namely, shipping the vast majority of its books offsite. The Library of Congress, for example, owns 34 million books and stores offsite only 3 million. Petersen asked Darnton, who oversees Harvard's Widener library, what would happen if he were to try such a plan there. "We're not about to take the stacks out of Widener," Darnton answered. "Why do it to NYPL if you won't do it to Widener?" Petersen replied.
Darnton asserted that meetings of the library's Board of Trustees are open to the public, and suggested that the trustees will welcome visitors.

Update, 10 minutes later: I just saw the wording of a nondisparagement agreement signed by a recent NYPL employee, and it's much more sweeping than Marx suggested last night. There's no mention of any exception for an issue of public interest. To the contrary, the wording forbids any comment that would adversely affect any of the library's plans. Perhaps Marx was merely acknowledging last night that the First Amendment would make enforcement of the agreement over an issue of public interest impossible. Please understand that I'm not a lawyer, and if you're under one of these agreements, please do consult a lawyer before speaking out. Further update, a few hours later: The New York Times has just published a new article about the library's gag orders.

A petition and a public debate

2012-05-14T08:06:47-07:00

You can now sign online the petition asking the New York Public Library to reconsider its $350 million plan to remove 3 million books from its 42nd Street building. The petition has been organized by Joan Scott of the Institute of Advanced Study, and the names of the 700 or so early signers are also online.

The journal n+1 and the New York Institute of the Humanities are hosting a panel debate on the future of the library next Tuesday, May 22, from 6:30 to 8:30pm, at the New School's Theresa Lang Community Center, 55 West 13th Street, on the second floor. The moderator will be Eric Banks, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, and participants will include Joan Scott, David Nasaw, Charles Petersen, and others. A top administrator from the library has also been invited to participate.

The New York Public Library in crisis

2012-05-09T09:17:34-07:00

As for the research-level books, most of them are leaving. Of the 5 million books currently housed at the main building, only 2 million will remain. The chance that a book you want will be in Manhattan will drop from around 70 to around 20 percent. The administration says the standard turnaround time for books from the New Jersey facility will be twenty-four hours. This strains credulity. The small number of books already housed at Princeton typically take closer to three days to make it to Manhattan, and the new system will be dealing with many more books and requests.

Please read Charles Petersen's two-part chronicle of the New York Public Library's crisis in the latest issue of n+1. Part two is here.

A New Plan for the New York Public Library

2012-04-30T06:35:26-07:00

In 2008, the trustees and administrators of the New York Public Library came up with a bold idea. The future of the e-book looked bright and the use of the library's print books had been steadily declining, so they proposed shipping at least 3 million of the 5 million books in its 42nd Street research library to storage in New Jersey. Into the vacated space, they hoped to fold the Mid-Manhattan Library (MML) and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The cost of the dismantling and construction looked high—the current estimate is well over $300 million—but the library expected to be able to sell the real estate occupied by MML and SIBL in order to help pay for it. The economic downturn of late 2008, however, forced the plan into cold storage.

This February, as real estate prices began to recover, they pulled the plan out of cryo. It wakes up into a different world. E-books may be a hit with readers, but at the moment few major publishers are willing to license e-books to libraries, and last year a federal judge struck down a deal that might have allowed Google Books to provide digital copies of books whose copyright owners can't be found. Until Congress passes a new copyright law—don't hold your breath for that—researchers remain dependent on ink-on-paper books, even if they prefer electronic ones. In fact, in the years since 2007, the use of ink-on-paper books at the library's 42nd Street branch has been stable and steady, according to the library's own statistics. Surprise: 2012 doesn't look quite like what the futurologists of 2008 predicted.

Is it really necessary therefore to compromise the architecture of a landmark building? Is it necessary to damage the library's research mission by drastically lowering the number of books within quick reach? I haven't been alone in wondering whether the Central Library Plan (CLP), as it's called, still makes sense. A petition is circulating that asks the library's trustees to reconsider, and it's been signed by Thomas Bender, Peter Brooks, Judith Butler, Natalie Zemon Davis, Jonathan Galassi, Anthony Heilbut, Jackson Lears, Jonathan Lethem, David Levering-Lewis Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Lorin Stein, and hundreds more. I've written previously on this blog about my doubts of the CLP's alleged merits and about my dismay at the prospect of degrading a research library into a mere book-lending service for local academics. In this post, I'd like to suggest a way out—an alternative plan.

What if the library chose to sell only one property—the site of the Science, Industry, and Business Library—but before doing so, used it as a temporary home for the Mid-Manhattan Library while that building was being renovated? I'll go into detail below, but let me say at once that I'm sure my alternative plan can easily be improved. Please consider it a rough draft. I offer it only as a means of suggesting that there must be other ways to achieve the library's goals.

What are those goals? As far as I can tell, the CLP offers three boons. First, it would upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library, the flagship of the city's circulating libraries, which is in bad need of repair. More New Yorkers check books out from the Mid-Manhattan Library than any other branch in the system. Renovating the MML seems to me to be the best part of the CLP—maybe the only part that's unambiguously a good thing. The funding of the circulating libraries is the city's responsibility, and I doubt it's a coincidence that the amount that the city has agreed to contribute to the CLP—$150 million—is equal to the estimated stand-alone cost of renovating the Mid-Manhattan. In my opinion, spending $350 million to do a $150 million renovation isn't the way to go about it, but I do believe that the renovation is worth doing.

Second, library administrators have claimed that the CLP's consolidation of three buildings into one will save the library around $10 million a year in operating expenses. However, administrators also claim that the plan will increase the number of square feet open to the public, they haven't named any services they expect to cut, and many of the costs of operating the buildings have long been footed by the city, which reexamines its contribution to the library every budget cycle with an eye toward lowering it. It's difficult, in other words, to know how solid this benefit is likely to be. Its exact size may also depend on whether the library is able to raise enough funds for the plan so that some portion of the money realized by the real estate sales can be added to the endowment. It's worth keeping in mind, when considering this part of the benefit, that donors might be as willing to contribute to an alternative plan as they are to the CLP.

Third, the library's administrators have recently begun to say that the books stored at 42nd Street are not being well cared for and will be safer in storage in New Jersey. Indeed, the temperature, light, and humidity controls at the New Jersey facility are state of the art. There is nothing structurally wrong with the bookshelves at the heart of the 42nd Street building, though—to the contrary, they hold up the Rose reading room above them—and the library did install heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in the 1980s. Still, improved preservation conditions do constitute a benefit and are worth taking into account.

Are there ways for the library to achieve some or all of these three goods without damaging its architecture or its research mission?

An alternative path to construction

This suggestion involves a three-step plan.

1. Give SIBL a temporary home inside the 42nd Street building.

At the moment there's a great deal of space in the 42nd Street building not being used to full advantage, including the Salomon room, the south wing of the second floor, the rooms that formerly housed the Slavic & Baltic and Asian & Middle Eastern divisions, and the South Court.

The Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) was conceived of as a research library when it launched a little more than a decade ago. Its research collections have been little used since, however, and much of the space is now given over to computer training and job-search assistance. A permanent home can be found for the research functions—the original nugget of SIBL—in the 42nd Street building, and a temporary home can be found there for the computer training and job-search elements of its current mission.

2. House the Mid-Manhattan Library in SIBL's old building while Mid-Manhattan is renovated.

Once the functions of SIBL have been shifted into the 42nd Street building, SIBL's building can be re-outfitted as the temporary home of the Mid-Manhattan Library for two years, the time needed for the Mid-Manhattan site to be renovated. Defenders of the CLP have expressed concern that the city will renege on its support if the CLP is tampered with in any way. I think that sells city officials short. Why wouldn't they remain willing to pay the $150 million cost of the Mid-Manhattan's renovation even if the library comes up with a different way of doing it? If zoning laws—or the political will to alter them—permit, a basement-to-rooftop renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Library could add space. Maybe a little space: enough to house the computer training and job search programs formerly at SIBL. Mabye a lot: enough to lease out extra floors for commercial uses, improving the library's longterm bottom line. Even if no space can be added, a gut renovation will surely allow for a more rational use of the space in Mid-Manhattan and greater efficiencies.

3. Sell SIBL's old building.

Once the renovation of Mid-Manhattan is complete, the site of the former Science, Industry, and Business Library can be sold, and the proceeds can be added to the library's endowment. True, the library's trustees will only realize the value of selling one building, not two as in the CLP, but instead of spending $350 million, they'll only be spending $150 million plus the cost of temporarily re-outfitting SIBL. (If that cost turns out to be prohibitively high, there might be less-expensive places to house MML during its renovation. Perhaps additional floors could be rented in the building where the new Donnell is to go?) The $150 million renovation, moreover, will likely be covered by the city. Even if private donors contribute no funds at all to this alternative plan—an unlikely eventuality; are donors going to be mad at the library for having realized that ink-on-paper books are important after all?—this alternative might well result in a larger contribution to the library's endowment than the CLP could deliver. Meanwhile, after SIBL is closed, three buildings will be consolidated into two, realizing a significant portion of the operational efficiencies offered by the CLP. If you add together the alternative plan's contribution to the endowment (possibly larger than the CLP's) and its improvement of operational efficiencies (probably smaller than the CLP's), you get an impact on the library's annual bottom line comparable to that proposed by the CLP. (It's impossible, unfortunately, to do the arithmetic with any amount of precision until the library releases the numbers underlying its own calculations.)

Other ways to improve the research library

The following suggestions are stand-alones, and many could be adopted even if the library bulldozes ahead with the CLP.

1. Give every researcher who wants one a reserve shelf

Once the new Mid-Manhattan is open, job-search and computer-training programs can move into it, and there will once again be a great deal of space in the 42nd Street building not used to full capacity. The CLP calls for assigning much of that space to scholars and researchers, to be used as writing spaces. That's a great idea, but I have two reservations. First, if the library continues its Marli program, which allows research books to be checked out, there will eventually be few serious researchers who want to work onsite. The NYPL will come to resemble university libraries, whose users expect the finding of books to be a chore and therefore hoard books in compensation. Serious researchers will visit to pick their books up, but there won't be much reason for them to stick around. After all, the advantages of working onsite in a research library—reliable, nearly instant access to the collection—will have been lost. My second reservation: assigning special places to a limited number of writer-researchers is in conflict with the public mission of the New York Public Library. The library already does have special writing spaces, of course: the Wertheim room is for anyone working on a long-term project, the Allen room for anyone with a signed book contract, and the Cullman Center is the home of a competitive fellowship. But the Cullman Center, which awards a stipend, only admits a few people each year, and there are long waiting lists for the Allen and Wertheim rooms.

Meanwhile, the affordances of these rooms aren't really optional to serious research at the NYPL any more. Supporters of the CLP have accused critics like me of failing to realize that offsite storage is inevitable, given the explosion in the number of titles published and the finite nature of Manhattan real estate. That's not true in my own case. I recognize that offsite storage is inevitable. In fact, I've been working with and around the NYPL's offsite system for more than a decade. It's a real pain, but it's become a fact of life, and I've come to realize that the best weapon against the delay and inefficiency caused by offsite storage is a reserve shelf. If you can order a few dozen books on your topic from offsite and hold them for a month or two, the damage is minimized. Upstairs in the Rose reading room, though, a researcher can only put three books on reserve for a week at a time. Three books! I've worked under those conditions. It's very hard to do serious research three books at a time, and it's nearly impossible if, the moment you return the fourth book, it boards a truck to New Jersey.

It would be easy to remedy the problem. If the library's administrators really wanted to, they could do so tomorrow. Sit in the Rose reading room and look up: there's a balcony running all along the room's interior, currently closed to the public. This balcony now houses, among other things, the black volumes of the NYPL's printed catalog (still sometimes useful, but there's an accessible copy in the catalog room next-door) and the green volumes of the National Union Catalog (oudated and immensely bulky, and crying out to be sent to New Jersey). In other words, the shelves on the balcony are prime real estate, not well deployed. What if the stairs to it were opened to the public, and what if the shelves were cleared, numbered, and assigned on a rotating basis to researchers? It should be a "permeable" reserve, like the system currently in place in the Allen, Wertheim, and Cullman rooms: that is, if someone else in the library wants a book on your shelf, a librarian will fetch it for them, unless you happen to be reading it at exactly that moment. When you want the book again, you just ask for it back. What if it were possible to arrange online for the setup of such a shelf, a day or a week in advance of visiting the library, and ask for books to be delivered to the shelf in advance as well? Then a researcher would be able to hit the ground running. Probably a large number of people would sign up for the shelves when they debuted, but if you set the shelves up to expire automatically if no new books have been requested after, say, a month, they'd turn over quickly and I doubt that the library would run out of shelf space. Since no books on these reserve shelves would be leaving the Rose reading room, and all users of them would be in an open, well-patrolled space, there would be no security issues beyond those that already obtain in the Rose.

2. Give local faculty and graduate students special working areas.

What to do then with the smaller rooms on the second floor of the 42nd Street building? Please consider this element of my proposal very speculative. Despite my concern about the Marli program, it does allow scholars who go through NYPL access to Columbia and NYU's collections, and it would be nice to preserve that access. The trouble is that Columbia and NYU share with the rest of the human race the regrettable trait of selfishness. What's in it for them? Their faculty, as members of the public, are already able to use every service that NYPL provides, so in exchange for granting NYPL users access to their collections, the current bargain gives them something more: the right to take NYPL books out of the building. As I've explained before, I fear that in the long term the ability to take books out of the research collection will alter the culture of the research library for the worse.

What if, instead, NYPL were to offer its Marli collaborators something different? Maybe they could offer some of those beautiful rooms sitting empty in the south wing of the library's second floor, for example. What if, in exchange for Marli access, NYPL granted Columbia's and NYU's faculty and graduate students special reading rooms with reserve shelves, much like the Allen and Wertheim rooms today? No books would leave the building. As elsewhere, the reserve shelves would be permeable. There would be privacy in these rooms, but since the users would have been vetted by their home universities, the privacy wouldn't create security issues any greater than those that currently obtain in the Allen and Wertheim rooms. I see the obvious objection: it's hardly in accordance with the NYPL's democratic, public mission to give away space to private institutions. This is a fair objection, but the benefit that Marli offers to the public—access to Columbia and NYU's research collections for free—is substantial, and I think you could argue that the bargain would be worth it. Moreover, it's in the NYPL's interest, in the long term, to cultivate working relationships with scholars at local institutions, and such an agreement might go far to solidifying those relationships. Would Columbia and NYU go for it? Would they be willing to let NYPL's users check out their books in exchange for special rooms at the NYPL? I don't know, and that's one reason this suggestion is highly speculative. (For the record: It's been half a dozen years since I taught at Columbia, and I would not personally benefit from this suggestion.)

A further thought: The most avid users of the Marli program are the graduate students and faculty of CUNY, and CUNY has a special claim of the library's resources, because it's a creation of the city, whose support for the library is old and deep. I'd therefore argue that CUNY faculty and graduate students, too, should be given a dedicated reading room in the library with reserve shelves.

In short: Mend Marli, don't end it. Instead of giving collaborating institutions the right to remove books from the building, give their faculty and grad students a special reason to come to the building and work there.

3. Activate the second floor of the Bryant Park Stack Extension.

If the library's administrators refuse to alter the CLP, the least they can do is mitigate its impact. When the Bryant Park Stack Extension (BPSE) was first built, space was dug, and concrete poured, for two floors. Only one of the floors was ever outfitted for use; it's now estimated to hold 1.2 million to 1.5 million books. If the library goes through with the CLP, the number of books onsite will drop from 5 million to 2 million. But if the second floor of BPSE were outfitted, the drop would only be from 5 million to 3.2 million.

If the 42nd Street building left intact, the second floor's state-of-the-art preservation conditions could become the home of any materials currently in the stacks and considered especially vulnerable. (Of course, vulnerable items could be shifted into the already existing floor, too. And there are other potential remedies to the administrators' concern about heat, light, and humidity in the stacks: the HVAC system could be upgraded, and UV filters could be added to the west-facing windows.)

Since I'm blue-skying, I'll throw out one more idea. What if the second floor of the Bryant Park Stack Extension were Mansueto-ized?

4. Experiment with new shelving algorithms.

In the days before computers, a book's call number told you where it was. If you had the call number, the way to find it was to look on a map and see where books with that call number were shelved. A librarian could move a whole array of books with the same call number, so long as she updated the maps, but she couldn't move a single book from one place to another unless she altered its call number—or else she'd lose it. In preparation for the CLP, the library has at last undertaken to put bar codes on all the books in its collection. Once the bar-coding is complete, it will for the first time be possible to separate a book's call number from its location. The bar code on a book will become its most important reference point, and it will be possible to place the book anywhere so long as the computer catalog is told its new location.

The library is already taking advantage of this separability. If you browse through books in the JFD call range, you'll see that although most books published more than twenty years ago have already left the building in anticipation of the CLP's implementation, books with neighboring call numbers that were published more recently are being allowed to stay. This book-by-book individuation is only possible because the computer catalog is being relied on to remember which books are where. The call number alone no longer tells you.

Here's another possibility: Suppose that whenever an offsite book is returned, the computer catalog remembers the date and time of its return and categorizes it for a year as being stored on a special range of shelves in the 42nd Street building with a name like "Ready Recall." As offsite books are returned, the physical books are added to the Ready Recall shelf in the order in which they are returned, and a librarian marks the end of the day by inserting a divider of some kind into the bookshelf. If anyone later wants a book in Ready Recall, the computer spits out the date and time of the book's last return, which tells the librarian where in the Ready Recall shelf it is. After a year, any book still on the Ready Recall shelf in its original position is returned to offsite storage, and the catalog is updated to change its location from "Ready Recall" to "Offsite." But in the meantime, any offsite book used in the past year is available onsite, quickly.

It might be that books requested from offsite are rarely requested again—in which case this suggestion of mine isn't worth the bother. But I suspect that books requested from offsite are more likely than other offsite books to be requested again—in which case my suggestion would minimize to-and-fro and reduce delivery delays.

5. Allow NYPL staff to speak freely.

Perhaps the most upsetting discovery I've made in the course of blogging about the CLP is that the New York Public Library powerfully discourages its staff from speaking freely. I did not expect, when I started voicing my concerns, to be receiving emails from library staff members who explained that they were writing under pseudonyms, from email accounts that they earnestly hoped were untraceable. I've been told that departing staff members are often required to sign gag orders in order to receive their severance packages. The library could take a small step toward opening up—humanizing, even—its management culture by unilaterally declaring that it considers all such gag orders unenforceable. To free up the staff currently working at the library, and to tap the full value of their intellectual capacity, the administrators will have to do more than make declarations. They will have to work for years to regain their trust.

Please keep in mind, as debate continues, that the library's culture of secrecy has made it hard for me and other critics to find answers to basic questions about the CLP. I repeatedly asked library administrators to break down for me where they expected the savings from consolidation to come from, to no avail. I repeatedly asked them to clarify how they're counting the books in the building, also to no avail. I expect that some of the suggestions that I've made in this post will turn out to be impossible to implement because of facts that the library has chosen not to disclose.

6. Set up a permanent advisory committee of scholars and writers.

If Columbia University had proposed removing the stacks at the core of its Butler library, or if Harvard had proposed the same for its Widener library, the faculty would have revolted. But the people in charge of those libraries would never have made such proposals, because they're in touch with the scholars who use them. When librarians at those institutions need to move books offsite—and I repeat that I understand that offsite storage is a necessity, for as much of the history of the printed book as remains to be lived through—they consult the professors expert in each field before they do so. Rather late in the game, the NYPL is trying to make such a consultation now, through the advisory panel that I was briefly a member of. But my own experience with that panel suggests to me that the administrators aren't entirely sure whether they're conducting a conversation or a public-relations exercise, and in any case, an ad hoc panel convened in a crisis is inadequate. The library needs a permanent advisory panel to keep its administrators and trustees in touch with the researchers who use it. How many members it should have, how long they should serve, whether outside organizations like the American Council of Learned Societies or the American Historical Association should appoint the members—these are questions to be worked out by people who know more about such entities than I do. All I know is that the library needs such a panel, and that the panel should have a measure of self-governance and a guarantee of free expression.

Our former car

2012-04-23T18:32:43-07:00

Our car was totaled at 7:30 Sunday morning while parked on Prospect Park Southwest. It was hit so hard that it shoved the car parked in front of it into the car parked in front of it—a three-car pile-up!—and then bounced onto the sidewalk. The police tell us that witnesses saw two women get out of the vehicle that struck our car, switch seats, and drive away. One of the witnesses noted the license plate number, we do have insurance, and of course we were asleep in bed at the time, so we're fine. I took these photos this afternoon in the parking lot of the auto body shop that it was towed to.

Uninvited

2012-04-13T10:00:46-07:00

This morning Ann Thornton, the director of the New York Public Library, telephoned to ask me not to attend next Thursday's meeting of the scholars' and writers' advisory panel. She said that the library's administrators felt that I had chosen to act as a journalist, that at the next meeting the panel would decide whether to permit journalistic coverage of its proceedings, and that the administrators intended to disclose circulation numbers to the panel next week and wanted them to feel they could speak freely. If the panel decided to admit journalists, then I might be invited back.

I thanked her for letting me know.

"Our patrimony in jeopardy"?

2012-04-12T20:02:31-07:00

In its recent publicity statements about the Central Library Plan, the New York Public Library has begun to assert that the 3 million books shelved on the stacks underneath the Rose reading room of the 42nd Street building are in peril. Tonight, at a meeting of the Municipal Arts Society in the Brooklyn Public Library, the NYPL president Anthony Marx went so far as to say that "our patrimony is in jeopardy." However, the administrators haven't yet said what kind of peril the books are in, or whether there are any measures that might resolve the problem short of what the administration wants to do: gut the shelving and ship the 3 million books they contain to New Jersey.

In fact, an HVAC system was installed in the stacks in the 1980s. It's probably not state-of-the-art any more, but it seems unlikely that the books are in imminent danger. Couldn't materials that are especially fragile be shifted to storage areas with better preservation conditions, perhaps in the Bryant Park Stack Extension? If there's concern about light, couldn't UV filters be added to the windows overlooking Bryant Park at relatively little expense?

If you'd like to see for yourself the condition of the stacks, you can. (Or if you'd just like to say good-bye.) On the first floor of the 42nd Street building, enter the South Court, walk straight to the back, and turn left into a narrow corridor. The South Court was built in what used to be a staff parking lot, and you'll be standing right next to what used to be an exterior of the main building. You can peer through the windows into the stacks themselves. (If you have sharp eyes, you can probably look into the stacks through the windows along the Bryant Park facade of the building, too, but I don't have such sharp eyes.) In South Court you can walk right up to the windows, put your camera next to the glass, and take pictures like these. There's a certain amount of junk lying around, including a photocopier mummified in plastic and unused chairs. But it looks more or less the way institutional Carnegie-era shelving usually looks: hardly glamorous but quite rugged.

Behind closed doors

2012-04-09T22:24:23-07:00

On Thursday morning, 5 April 2012, I joined a group of writers and scholars who had been asked to tell the New York Public Library what we thought of the Central Library Plan, which I've recently been criticizing on this blog. There were eight other writers and scholars on the panel besides me; NYPL president Anthony Marx and research-library director Ann Thornton represented the library. Some of you may have been wondering why I haven't reported the results of this meeting sooner. Alas, there's a problem: I goofed.

I arrived at the meeting expecting to write about it afterward publicly. It's a journalistic convention that if a public official knows you're a journalist and you're talking about public business, the comments are on the record, unless another agreement has been worked out before hand. So sure was I of my rights that I committed journalistic boner #1: I didn't ask explicitly, at the start of the meeting, whether it was on the record. (I didn't think the comments of my fellow panelists were on the record, by the way, only those of the library's officers.) Then I compounded my error with journalistic boner #2: I asked for the sources' retroactive permission. On Thursday evening I wrote an email to Anthony Marx and Ann Thornton, asking whether they had intended for their remarks to be on the record. On Friday afternoon, Anthony Marx wrote that he would abide by the understanding of those panelists who preferred to keep the meeting off the record (even though I hadn't asked for permission to quote the remarks of those, or any, panelists). I tried to repair my gaffes on Monday morning, by proposing to Anthony Marx and Ann Thornton that I re-interview them, apart from the rest of the panel, in order to ask the same questions all over again, this time explicitly on the record. But Ann Thornton replied at the end of the day that she is away for the week and that Anthony Marx is "fully booked."

So that's why you haven't heard from me about what happened at Thursday's advisory meeting. My apologies for my boneheadedness. In the aftermath of the meeting, I have sent several follow-up questions to the administrators, asking for clarification about numbers given to the panel, especially where they seemed discrepant with other sources, and in the email in which she declined a re-interview, Ann Thornton wrote me that she hoped I would find answers to my questions in the library's "next round of communications."

Judging by this experience, I don't think anyone should expect this advisory panel to have much investigative authority or capacity. I've pressed as hard as is consonant with civility, and I'm afraid I don't have much to show for it publicly. I've been given private answers to some of my questions, but I worry that unless the answers are offered to the public, there's no way to recruit outsiders to help fact-check them, and no way to hold the library accountable later for promises implicit in its reassurances.

The paradoxical thing about all this is that I thought the library made a stronger case in its Thursday meeting than ever before. The conflict over permission to quote has thrown me more or less back into my former skepticism, however. I'm trying to make an effort to see the problem apart from my personal frustrations here, but it may take me a few days. At the moment I'm feeling a little played.

Though I can't share the library's answers, I can still share my questions. Here's a list that I circulated before the meeting:

Questions about the Central Library Plan

What's the Central Library Plan for? What problem is it designed to solve? Isn't there any way to solve it without jeopardizing the research mission of the library?

Why doesn't the library consider alternative ways of building a new circulating library? For example, why not try to do with the Mid-Manhattan site something like what the Museum of Modern Art did when it expanded a few years ago? If there's concern about shuttering the circulating library during renovation, why not use SIBL as a temporary site?

How much does the library expect to make by selling the Mid-Manhattan Building? By selling SIBL? How much would a gut-renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Building cost? The CLP would require the library to build much more space at its New Jersey storage facility. How much will that cost?

The library claims that the CLP will reduce operating expenses, but it also claims that the CLP will increase the number of square feet open to the public. Where exactly would the savings come from, then? Will services be reduced? Will staff be let go? If so, in which areas?

Is there an unused second floor of storage space in the Bryant Park Stack Extension? If so, why isn't it being used? How much would it cost to make that space usable?

The Central Library Plan was conceived in 2008, when many hoped that Google Books would be able to make digital proxies of the books in the world's libraries. But a federal judge struck down the Google Books deal last year, and copyright protection will keep the vast majority of the world's books out of digital circulation for the foreseeable future. Shouldn't the library adjust its plans and retain as many physical books onsite as it can?

The library's research collection of books is unique in the world in size and scope. But access to computers is spreading rapidly through society; most coffee shops come with Wifi access. Isn't it risky to shift the library's focus from books to computer access? Shouldn't what's unique about the library remain the core of its identity?

When the library first introduced its Recap storage facility in 2000, books were delivered to 42nd Street within 24 hours. But delivery time soon slipped to 48 hours, and now many users report that it takes three to five days. Why is it reasonable to expect that the library will do any better in the future? Even if delivery speed does improve in the short term, won't it be sacrificed the next time there's a budget crisis at the library? (As I understand it, bar-coding isn't likely to speed up delivery from offsite storage, because all books offsite have already been bar-coded. It was only books still at 42nd Street that until recently hadn't been.)

The library says that it's concerned that the 42nd Street stacks don't adequately protect books. But Scott Sherman reports that in months and months of conversations that he had with NYPL staff members, in preparation for his article about the library for The Nation, no one mentioned to him any concerns about the stacks. Why is the library suddenly concerned? Exactly what standards is it concerned about? How urgent are these issues? Are there other ways to resolve them?

As part of the CLP, the library has suggested it will offer new workspace for writers and new funds for buying books and paying the salaries of bibliographers. But it isn’t necessary to remove 3 million books from the library in order to find room for 400 reserve shelves, which would only hold about 12,000 books. Can't spaces like South Court or the former Slavic and Middle Eastern divisions be repurposed as writers' spaces without any damage to the library's research mission, and wouldn't it be more thrifty to raise funds for books and for librarians's salaries directly, rather than via a $350-million detour?

Update, April 10: In his remarks just now on the Leonard Lopate show, Anthony Marx put on the record a few facts and numbers that he had given to the advisory panel on Thursday:

The estimated cost of renovating the Mid-Manhattan Library is $150 million. (I'd guess that it's probably not an accident that the City of New York is willing to contribute exactly this amount toward the Central Library Plan.) Renovating the building would probably require closing it for two years.
There are two floors to the Bryant Park Stack Extension, the storage facility underground and next to the 42nd Street building. Each floor is capable of holding 1.2 to 1.5 million volumes, but only one is currently outfitted for use. It would cost $20 million to outfit the second floor, and Marx points out that because an institution may only spend 5 percent of its endowment, a $20 million expenditure of capital represents a decrease of $1 million in yearly operating funds. My opinion: Short of rethinking the Central Library Plan in its entirety, this is probably the only element where a protest by scholars could win a significant compromise, and there needs to be significant debate about it.

Further update, April 11: In his essay on the Huffington Post blog, which was just brought to my attention, Anthony Marx puts on the record a little more information that was released at the advisory panel. He reveals that there will soon be Saturday delivery of offsite materials, and it will soon be possible to make offsite requests directly from the online catalog. He also seems to be committing the library quite strongly to keeping the research facility open until 11 pm and to providing 400 desks with reserve shelving for researchers.

A Chronology of Press Clippings about the NYPL's Central Library Plan

2012-04-03T16:59:38-07:00

Here's a list, in roughly chronological order, of articles that have appeared to date about the New York Public Library's plan to remove 3 million books and seven stories of shelving from its 42nd Street research building.

Robin Pogrebin. "British Architect to Redesign City Library." New York Times. 23 October 2008.
Nicolai Ouroussoff. "Treading Carefully but Not Timidly in a Civic Masterpiece." New York Times. 23 October 2008.
Scott Sherman. "Upheaval at the New York Public Library." The Nation. 19 December 2011.
The New York Public Library. "Reimagining the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building." NYPL.org website. Undated.
Charles Petersen. "The Lions in Winter." With part 2 here. N+1. 9 May 2012.
Norman Oder. "'Upheaval at the New York Public Library'? At the Least, Some Clouds Over Transformation Plan." Library Journal website. 22 December 2011.
Robin Pogrebin. "Ambitions Rekindled at Public Library." New York Times. 16 February 2012.
"Controversy at the New York Public Library." The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC. 12 March 2012.
Caleb Crain. "Build More Deliberately," "The NYPL's Central Library Plan: Some Updates and Corrections," and "The Culture of the New York Public Library's Research Divisions." Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. 15 March, 27 March, and 1 April 2012.
Scott McLemee. "Stop Cultural Vandalism." Inside Higher Ed. 28 March 2012.
Anthony Grafton. "A Tale of Two Libraries and a Revolution." The Daily Princetonian. 2 April 2012.

Updates:

Kelly Burdick. "Opponents of radical NYPL renovation coalesce." Moby Lives, the Melville House blog. 4 April 2012.
Christopher Shea. "The Changing Culture of the New York Public Library." Ideas Market, a blog of the Wall Street Journal. 4 April 2012.
Anthony Marx. "Improving a Treasured Institution." Inside Higher Ed. 6 April 2012.
Brian Braiker. "New York Public Library's plan to take books off shelves worries scholars." The Guardian. 6 April 2012.
Garrison Keillor and the staff of A Prairie Home Companion. "Guy Noir Visits the New York Public Library." A Prairie Home Companion. 7 April 2012.
Jennifer Maloney. "Libraries Rethink Their Role in City." Wall Street Journal. 9 April 2012.
"New York Public Library President Anthony Marx." The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC. 10 April 2012.
Anthony Marx. "NYPL Embraces the Future of Libraries—Today: Your Questions Answered." Huffington Post: The Blog. 10 April 2012.
Robin Pogrebin. "Library Chief Defends Plan to Renovate." New York Times. 15 April 2012.
Francine Fialkoff. "Rich NYPL, Poor NYPL." Library Journal. 16 April 2012.
Victoria Bekiempis. "New York Public Library Renovations: Good or Bad?". Runnin' Scared: A Village Voice News Blog. 16 April 2012.
Scott Sherman. "The Battle Over the New York Public Library, Continued." The Nation. 18 April 2012.
"Anthony Marx, New York Public Libary President, Answers Reader Questions." Arts Beat blog, New York Times. 20 April 2012.
Edmund Morris. "Sacking a Palace of Culture." New York Times. 22 April 2012.
Jennifer Howard. "Debate at N.Y. Public Library Raises Question: Can Off-Site Storage Work for Researchers?" Chronicle of Higher Education. 22 April 2012.
Scott McLemee. "For Books, Against Boilerplate." Inside Higher Ed. 25 April 2012.
Mark Lamster. "Where's the Model?" Observatory: A Design Observer Blog. 25 April 2012.
Chloe Schama. "Let in the Riffraff: In Praise of the New York Public Library’s Renovation Plan." The New Republic. 27 April 2012.
Kelly Chan. "Norman Foster’s Plans for a More 'Democratic' New York Public Library Meets Fierce Opposition." Object Lessons, an Art Info blog. 27 April 2012.
Christina Boyle. "Battle of words: Sweeping Central Library redesign plan stirs controversy." New York Daily News. 6 May 2012.
New York Daily News editorial board. "New York Public Library must look to the future." New York Daily News. 7 May 2012.
Polly Thistlethwaite. "The New York Public Library Central Library Plan and its Critics." ACRLog: A blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries. 7 May 2012.
Marilyn Johnson. "Diversions from the NYPL." This Book Is Overdue, the author's blog of Marilyn Johnson. 8 May 2012.
New York Times editorial board. "A Library for the Future." New York Times. 9 May 2012.
Charles Petersen. "Lions in Winter." With part two here. N+1. 9 May 2012.
Robin Pogregin. "Cultural Heavyweights Let Public Library Know They Don’t Like Planned Revamp." Arts Beat, a New York Times blog. 9 May 2012.
Robert Darnton. "In Defense of the New York Public Library." New York Review of Books. 7 June 2012 (online 14 May 2012).
Jennifer Maloney. "New Vision for Library." Wall Street Journal. 16 May 2012.
Samuel Goldman. "The People's Palace?" The American Conservative. 16 May 2012.
Shannon Christine Mattern. "Scholars and Ruffians: Reactionary Elitism in the NYPL Debate." Words in Space, a media studies professor's blog. 17 May 2012.
Robert Darnton, Howard Dodson, Joan Scott, Charles Petersen, and Caleb Crain. "Seizing the Future or Renouncing Its Past?" Room for Debate, New York Times website. 17 May 2012.
Robin Pogregin. "Public Library Head Faces Critics of Renovation Plan." New York Times. 23 May 2012.
Dan Rosenblum. "In a Heated Debate, Experts, Scholars, and Administrators Discuss a Plan that Would Radically Reshape the New York Public Library." Capital New York. 23 May 2012.
Renee (@reneemc). "5/22 NYPL Panel Discussion, The New School." A Storify collection of live tweets, assembled in reverse-chronological order. 23 May 2012.
Robin Pogrebin. "Former Employees Feel Silenced on Library Project." New York Times. 23 May 2012.
Jon Reiner. "America's Public Library Crisis: Who’s Reading the Books?" The Daily Beast. 23 May 2012.

The Culture of the New York Public Library's Research Divisions

2012-04-01T20:50:30-07:00

Every institution has its own culture—its distinctive way of doing things. In the best cases, the culture is functional. Over time, people who work in the institution have figured out good ways of solving the problems that recur, and these ways have become a part of their collective memory.

The research division of the New York Public Library has such a culture, and one of my fears about the proposed Central Library Plan is that it will disrupt this culture profoundly. Right now, the NYPL is a destination, a place where scholars and writers can do research with a speed and efficiency that can only be matched at places like the Library of Congress and the British Library. But I fear that the Central Library Plan will turn it into little more than a book-delivery system for professors within commuting distance.

To explain why I fear this, let me start by outlining the culture of a university library, a kind of library that many people who do research are familiar with, and then describe how the NYPL’s culture differs.

A university is not a democratic institution. It’s hierarchical, even if one considers only the intellectual work done there. At the top, intellectually speaking, are tenured professors. In descending order below them are professors without tenure, graduate students, undergraduates, and extension-school students. At the bottom are visiting outsiders, if they can be said to have any place at all (with one important exception, to be named in a minute). The mission of a university library is to serve the scholars at its university, and such a library naturally measures out access in accordance with this hierarchy. A professor, for example, may be able to check books out for a semester at a time, but an undergraduate may only be able to borrow them for a few weeks. There are safety valves in the system; an undergraduate can ask even a tenured professor to return a book. And there’s an advantage to the strict boundary between insiders and outsiders: every user of the library has been screened by an admission committee or a hiring committee, and is, as a member of the university community, subject to a number of subtle and not-so-subtle disciplinary controls. When a university library loans a book, there's good reason to believe it'll come back in good condition.

There are downsides, though. A university-library culture wastes what you might call book-hours. Professors and students are busy multi-taskers; their time is a premium commodity. If a spare hour comes along, they want to know they can make use of it, and so it’s in their interest to have all the books they're likely to need ready to hand—even if that spare hour doesn’t come by more than a few times a week. In other words, they hoard library books. For example, it might only take two work-days to read a book, but the fourteen hours in those work-days may be spread over months or even years, and so it’s in their interest—it’s a matter of scholarly survival, in fact—to keep possession of that book for many more book-hours than they actually need it.

As a graduate student, I sometimes shifted to my second- or even third-choice paper topic because all the books on my first-choice topic had been checked out. True, I could have recalled the books relating to my first-choice topic, but if I had done that, the first user of the books might then have recalled them from me in turn, after my two weeks of exclusive use were up. Is there anything more excruciating to a scholar than losing access to books that you’re in the middle of writing about? I’d have had to wait two more weeks before I could see the recalled books again. So it was more prudent to alter my plans and use books that no one else had recently laid claim to, even though that was hardly an optimal choice from a merely intellectual point of view.

At the highest level, the book-hours squandered by hoarding aren’t a terribly big problem because the interests of tenured professors are so specialized. There isn’t likely to be more than one Milton scholar in any single English department. The book-borrowing needs of the top dogs therefore rarely overlap. Few undergraduates plan far enough ahead to be able to wait the time it takes for a recalled book to be returned, so they’re not likely to disturb a professor’s long-term use of a book, and graduate students are constrained not only by a habit of deference but also by the sort of fears outlined in the paragraph above. In a university library, the problem of wasted book-hours really only rears its head with undergraduates, and there’s a workaround for it: course reserves. Since the book-borrowing needs of undergraduates overlap whenever they take courses together, books on a syllabus are put on reserve, where they can only be checked out for a few hours at a time.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the course-reserves desk is often in an unprepossessing part of the library. Undergraduates are low on the totem pole, and some of those who rely on course reserves are doing so to save money. There’s a punitive flavor to the need to return the book by a set time. It’s hard to relax, if one knows the clock is ticking. And because time is short, a reader is usually obliged to read the book on the spot—the unprepossessing spot. At the course-reserves desk, one is reminded in a number of ways that one is at the bottom of the academic food chain.

I dwell on these aesthetic drawbacks because almost everyone who went to college has experienced them and because in terms of institutional culture, the course-reserves desk is one of the few parts of a university library that resembles the way things work at the New York Public Library’s research division. Only one other part of the university library resembles it more: the part at the very top. Remember how I said that visiting outsiders have almost no place in a university library? The one place they do have, paradoxically, is the nicest one in the building: the rare book and manuscript room. If a visitor is able to present himself as a serious researcher (credentials like a Ph.D. help, but a book contract will do, and sometimes just a knowledgeable and polite demeanor are sufficient), he may be admitted to a special room, usually furnished with some luxury, where archivists will ask about his research project in detail, make any number of helpful suggestions, and then bring out, as he needs them, handwritten letters by famous authors that have never been published and rare, precious books that are only to be found in a few libraries anywhere. If you don't really need the resources of this room, its librarians won't let you in. But if you do really need them, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from.

When a person accustomed to a university library first walks into the New York Public Library’s research division, it’s confusing. You can’t check the books out. Does that mean it's like course reserves, or that it's like a rare book room? Am I at the top or the bottom? Neither, really, and if you’re coming from the hierarchical world of a university, that may spark some anxieties. I know that when I first started using the NYPL research division, after having used the libraries at Harvard and then Columbia, I found the system annoying. Harvard and Columbia trusted me to take their books home. Didn’t the NYPL know how special I was?

No, as a matter of fact, it didn’t know. And it didn’t need to. As a public library, its mission is to serve everyone. There are no insiders, and there are no outsiders. Doesn't this let in the riffraff? Maybe, but the absence of screening poses little or no threat to the books, because the books never leave the building with anyone. For the same reason, there's almost no waste of book-hours. If you want to read a book, and the New York Public Library's research division has a copy, you can read it—unless someone else happens to be reading it at that very moment. Books can be put on reserve, and there are shelves in the building where scholars working on long-term projects hold books. But if you want a book and it's on one of those shelves, it'll be fetched and brought to you, within minutes, so long as the other user doesn't happen to have the book open on his desk right then. Any number of Milton scholars can share a set of Milton's collected works on that understanding, because even tenured Milton scholars read Milton rarely in an absolute sense.

It's hard to trust that this culture will work if you're coming from a culture where it's necessary to hoard library books. But it does. In fact, it's better, and here's why: Even if you're a very rapacious and competent hoarder of library books, you can only hoard so many. What if, in the midst of research, you discover you need a book it hadn't previously occurred to you to hoard? You face the much-dreaded monster Delay after all. But not at the New York Public Library. Virtually any book is within your reach. This changes the way you work. "There's this thing that happens, where you start paging books just because you're curious about them," a friend told me, a month or two after I had started working at the NYPL on a regular basis. "Have you started doing it yet?" I admitted that I had. The strange thing was that I hadn't done such a thing at Columbia. Even though its stacks were open, looking for books was such a hassle and a crap shoot that I only went looking for them if I already knew more or less what I wanted to look at them for.

Still, a book checked out and waiting for you at home is awfully convenient. Is the New York Public Library's research division so superior that it offsets the inconvenience to a local professor of an hour's subway commute? For years many thought it was, thanks to the depth of its collection and the ready availability of its books. The variables in the equation began to shift, however, in the year 2000, when the library started to move books to an offsite storage facility. Right now, most of the library's books are still onsite, and a reader has access to them within minutes, but a fair number—somewhere between 24 and 33 percent, by my estimate—are now offsite and take at least two days to arrive. If the Central Library Plan goes through, the proportion of books offsite will jump to somewhere between 67 and 86 percent. Never mind the serendipity of following one's curiosity. Mere competence will be threatened. That's reason number one for my opposition to the Central Library Plan. Offsite storage is here to stay, so long as the library doesn't plan to throw books out—and nobody wants that. But I don't see the point of making a bad situation needlessly worse.

But there's another, less obvious danger. It seems likely that if the CLP goes through, the pilot program known as Marli will be continued and expanded. Marli allows a select group of NYPL's users to check books out of the research division. That isn't what it was for, as originally conceived. Its stated purpose was to allow NYPL's users to have access to the research libraries at Columbia and NYU, in exchange for allowing users of those libraries access to NYPL. The tricky part was that Columbia and NYU professors were already as free as any other citizen to use NYPL. Columbia and NYU were only willing to grant access to NYPL's users if NYPL was willling to give something more—and in negotiation, that something more turned out to be the right to take books in NYPL's research collection home. As a matter of fair play, it then only made sense for NYPL to allow its own vetted users to take the same books home.

Ann Thornton assured me last week that feedback from Marli's users has been overwhelmingly positive and that far more NYPL-based users take advantage of the exchange than do Columbia- or NYU-based users. And she pointed out that NYPL has been sending books out of the building through Interlibrary Loan for years, and that the only books cleared for borrowing through Marli are those in good condition that were published after 1900.

What concerns me is that through Marli, though no one seems quite to have intended it, the culture of the NYPL research division is being assimilated to the culture of the university library. What's unique about NYPL—its democratic access, and the ready availability of its books—has been compromised. NYPL now has a hierarchy, awarding borrowing privileges to some users but not others. And it now allows book hoarding. Research books can be checked out for 60 days, and the wait for a book to be recalled is bound to be even longer than the wait for a book to come from offsite storage. The program is only a year old, and so far it's quite small. Ann Thornton told me that only about 1700 NYPL books have been loaned out, and only one of these books has been recalled by another patron. At this size, one would expect the side effects to be minimal—scarcely even noticeable. But if the program continues, I suspect it will grow, as those outside the borrowing group start to notice that books are less often available and ask for the same privileges. Eventually every serious user of the library will want to be in the Marli program. Why wouldn't you want to be? And once you can take books home, and once books are only erratically and dilatorily available at the library, why bother to work there? I fear that the Marli program, especially in combination with the CLP plans to move the bulk of NYPL's books offsite, will reduce the library to no more than a book-delivery service.

Can't the NYPL keep its distinct culture? Must all research libraries be the same?

The NYPL's Central Library Plan: Updates and Corrections

2012-03-25T12:15:21-07:00

Last week, when I wrote about the New York Public Library's plans to remove the stacks and most of the books from its research collection on 42nd Street, I contrasted the different ways that writers and readers use a library. I was trying to convey the different missions of a research library, which allows access to deep, little-visited stores of knowledge, and a circulating library, which makes culture available to the public for free. A few people wrote to tell me that it's not only writers who rely on the New York Public Library's research collections. You're right! My distinction between writers and readers was only a metaphoric way of speaking, and it was imperfect. Creative people in other arts also need access to the cultural tradition, and mere curiosity leads many people to investigate who have no intention of addressing the public. It's also the case that the New York Public Library, located in a transit hub, serves academic researchers throughout the Northeast who teach at colleges that have only modest research collections on their own campuses.

In last week's post, I drew on statistics on the library's own website to estimate that there are now 5 million books at 42nd Street and 2.5 million offsite, and that after the Central Library Plan (CLP), there will be 1.5 million onsite and 6 million offsite. A friend points out that the situation after the CLP will actually be even worse than I estimated. Until recently, the books in the research collection at the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) were only a short walk away, at Madison Avenue and 34th Street. Under the CLP, SIBL's research collection is also slated to move to the library's storage facility in New Jersey (except for a small subset of special historical value, which will remain at 42nd Street). I can't find a good number for how many books are in SIBL's research collection. In 1996, the New York Times reported that it had 1.2 million books; I've heard that there are 3 million now. Whatever the number is, it makes the "before" picture that much better, and the "after" picture that much worse. If SIBL has 3 million books in its research collection, for example, then the ratio will go from 8 million books onsite and 2.5 million offsite to 1.5 million onsite and 9 million offsite.

On the other hand, during a cordial, on-the-record telephone conversation on Monday, Ann Thornton, the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries, told me that the library hopes that it will be able to store more than 1.5 million books onsite after the CLP. She said that the library isn't altogether certain of the capacity available in the Bryant Park Extension, the shelving that's underneath Bryant Park. They hope that there will turn out to be room for more than 1.5 million research-collection books; administrators are also trying to find storage space for them elsewhere within the 42nd Street building as well. Ann didn't, however, provide a new number.

There are a few other pieces of news and fact-checking to report from that conversation. When I asked whether any steps had yet been taken to implement the CLP, Ann said that the library was "in schematic design"—in other words, Norman Foster's architectural firm is now drawing up blueprints—but that no demolition or construction had yet taken place. Books, however, have already begun to leave the building. As they're bar-coded for the move, some books are being sent to a temporary offsite storage facility run by Clancy-Cullen. The books aren't going to Recap, the library's offsite storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey, because the library has filled its allotment of shelves there and needs to build more space. While the NYPL's books are at Clancy, they can still be paged by readers and retrieved for use at the 42nd Street library.

A number of colleagues have told me they find appealing the proposal in the CLP to provide 400 to 500 desks for writers at 42nd Street. I asked whether there was a firm commitment on the library's part for these desks, and Ann said it was just a proposal, though something the administration did hope to do.

On the webpage where the library discusses the CLP, the library has said that only 300,000 out of 5 million ink-on-paper volumes were used at 42nd Street last year. I asked about the data behind that statistic, because the research library switched to an electronic-based circulation system only in the last few years. Ann said that the statistic was based on data from the new electronic circulation system and on analysis of call slips that don't go through the electronic system. Is there comparable data for earlier years? Not quite, given the recency of the electronic system, but Ann said that the library had done what she called "snapshot analysis" in earlier years, based on the analysis of ink-on-paper call slips collected over a certain interval of time. She said they began performing these "snapshot analyses" before the offsite storage program was inaugurated in 2000, and that they've performed several in the years since. The library's data indicate that use of the research collection has been declining, though not as fast as the decline at other institutions that belong to the Association of Research Libraries. (She thinks the NYPL is doing better than average because of recent efforts to make its manuscript and archival collections easier to find.) One of my worries here is that comparisons across time may not be statistically significant if the means of data collection has changed so markedly. From paper call slips and pneumatic tubes, it's a big jump to bar codes and computers.

Ann mentioned that the library had stopped collecting in science at a research level before 2008, deciding to focus on its strengths in the humanities, but she assured me that it is still collecting in Slavic, though Czech literature isn't considered a particular strength. She said that the library looked forward to hiring more curators, with special expertise in Latin America and other areas. We also talked extensively about Marli, the program that allows users to check books out of the research collection for the first time, and I hope to write more about this complex topic later.

Our conversation didn't give me the sense that the library's administrators are yet reconsidering their plan to remove the 42nd Street building's bookshelves of Carnegie steel—which, by the way, are featured in beautiful archival photos that illustrate a 2010 essay on the library's own website.