Dear Friends,
Last week I passed the two month mark in my position as the Library’s Mellon Director, and I thought it a good time to write to you about my initial experience at NYPL. To say that these remarks are provisional—subject to revision—is an understatement of the first order, but I’d like to share my initial impressions of the challenges we confront and the opportunities available to us.
For starters, I want to say what a privilege it is to serve the Library and the scholars and researchers who depend upon its resources. I need not tell you that the NYPL is the greatest public research library in the world, precious to all of us who care about the life of the mind. To work among and for others who embrace that view is a heartfelt joy and a deeply felt responsibility.
I’ll begin with the three goals I articulated when I accepted this position: enhance and preserve the research collections, support the work of readers who use them, and advocate for the importance of archival research. Pretty basic assumptions these. Think of them as a sculptor’s armature on which a fuller vision is to be fleshed.
That embodiment is very much a work in progress, but here’s where I am at this early stage. In terms of preservation and enhancement, the abundance of NYPL’s holdings is breathtaking. A conservative estimate would put the number of books, manuscripts, and other items at more than 45 million. Staggering, really. Enhance, in that context, means building on enormous strength, on the legacy of the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Trusts and of the stewards who advanced those collections. We are called upon to continue that work both in highly visible ways—the recent acquisitions of NYRB and Tom Wolfe papers come to mind — and through other less celebrated additions that establish the ground for scholarly inquiry. To do so requires resources, of course, particularly in the form of dedicated endowments.
We also need to articulate a more comprehensive collection strategy. To some extent that endeavor is necessarily reactive—opportunistic—but it must be driven by something more: a set of principles shared across the four research libraries that articulate our goals, what we collect and why. One node of that conversation involves the question of “completeness,” an unsustainable ideal even for depository libraries. Simply put, there is too much material in the world, both in printed and digital forms, to sustain such ambition. This embarrassment of riches argues strongly for collaboration, the sharing of resources and responsibilities, a commitment to access rather than ownership. NYPL’s highly successful MaRLI program is a modest step in that direction. So too our ReCAP partnership with Columbia and Princeton, a venture which will add between 4 and 5 million entries to our catalog. Such cross-institutional cooperation opens the way to further initiatives, involving among other possibilities, collective purchasing strategies.
On the digital front, the prospects are tantalizing in the extreme. Joining with partners across the world to share collections and promote access to knowledge reignites the dream of Alexandria and evokes Melville’s vision of “genius, all over the world,” standing “hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” We are in the earliest phase of this work, but as the greatest public research library in the world, a commitment to access framed in the broadest of terms, is inscribed in our DNA.
Access, of course, is bound up with preservation. New initiatives to accelerate the conservation of our holdings are underway. We are particularly focused on NYPL’s rare audio and moving image collections and on the creation of a more robust digital preservation environment. I note with pleasure, the impending appointment of a new collections manager to help us build a program to better identify the processing, preservation, and security needs of our special collections.
The second objective — supporting the work of readers — is why research libraries exist. We’re not dragons guarding a lair; we are partners in extending knowledge, pressing back the limits of human understanding. It’s no secret that relations between the Library and many of the researchers it serves have been frayed in recent years. My challenge is to help rebuild trust. I know that rhetoric is useless, and enhanced services are essential. To that end, I am pleased to report that two major capital projects in the Schwarzman Building are nearing completion. The restoration of the Rose Reading Room ceiling is ahead of schedule, and we will reopen both the Rose Room and the Bill Blass Catalog Room this fall. If you missed David Dunlap’s account of this work in a recent NYT article, here’s a link.
The construction of the second level of the Milstein Research Stacks under Bryant Park is also progressing on schedule. In April we will begin the six-month process of bringing 1.5 million items back from temporary storage. We will do so with care and deliberation, ensuring safe and accurate delivery and placement, while minimizing disruption to researchers who wish to call upon this material. When these 1.5 million items come home, we will have additional space for 1 million books and other items, bringing our onsite capacity to 4.3 million. We will have the room we need for new acquisitions, our most heavily requested items.
Beyond capital projects, we need to fix longstanding problems in our catalog and discovery layers, through which researchers access our collections. We are at work on that problem and look forward to the arrival of our new Chief Digital Officer who will help expedite that process.
Space is a particular challenge. Saying that scholarship is a contemplative activity, requiring quiet and inviolate space, may seem an antiquated notion, but it’s one I embrace. Universities have an easier time restricting access and ensuring such conditions. As a public institution, we confront a more difficult challenge, but the reopening of the Rose Reading Room presents an opportunity to address traffic flow and to rededicate the space to research. We are developing plans to do so.
We are blessed with an extraordinary staff of talented and devoted people. We need more of them and we need to make them more accessible to researchers. With NYC support, the Library has done a great job rebuilding staffing levels in the branch libraries. We look to expand that success to the four research libraries.
Objective three involves advocacy: speaking for the importance of serious research in an age of Wikipedia and Google. If we are not prepared to make the case, then who is? I’ll have more on this point in future letters, but for now let me say that I am preaching that gospel at every opportunity, highlighting the relationship between the material we hold and the work that it generates, arguing that what we own is less important than how we use it.
Finally, across these two months I’ve been aware of the risk of getting lost in strategy and process. I remind myself daily to ask “To what end?” In one sense the answer is obvious: aid and abet the generation of new knowledge, nurture the life of the mind, support the emergence of new ideas from earlier consensus. In another, it involves sustaining the excitement inherent in walking through the door to find oneself surrounded by the palpable evidence of human achievement. Alberto Manguel has spoken of that moment as a compensatory experience, a counter to the loss and disappointment inherent in the human condition. Libraries provide such compensation not only through the aspirational histories they house, but also by registering our unquenchable attraction to design, to meaning-making activity.
In 1832, Emerson visited Paris for the first time. His spirits were at low ebb. The death of two of his brothers and of his beloved wife from tuberculosis had accelerated the crisis of faith which troubled his consciousness. Paris did not immediately charm him; he described the city as “a noisy, uncomfortable, New York kind of place”. Adrift, he took himself to the Jardin des Plantes where he viewed the specimen cabinets arranged by Buffon and Jussieu. The order their designs imposed on the natural world was being upset by the influx of new world specimens, by the stirrings of what we have come to think of as the Darwinian Revolution. Categories judged to be fixed were becoming radically unstable, cabinets were bleeding one into another. Meaning making had become an urgent activity.
The shock of recognition Emerson experienced, the eclaircissement he found in the Jardin, was exhilarating. He felt great joy that he was alive to witness the birth of a new world. Moved by “strange sympathies” and by the “upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient,” he writes in his journal: “I will be a naturalist”. Like Emerson, we are lucky to be alive when new structures of thought and feeling are emerging, and fortunate in the extreme to be denizens of a library where such transits are marked, embraced, and preserved.
Happy Spring!
Warmly,
Bill
William P. Kelly
Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries
The New York Public Library