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History
Branches The NYPL maintains 86 neighborhood branch libraries including five central circulating libraries throughout The Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. (Queens and Brooklyn have their own library systems, the Queens Borough Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, respectively.) Neighborhood branches offer popular fiction and non-fiction, videos, basic research materials and recreational programs, all tailored to the communities where they are located. The most recent addition to the system is the Morris Park branch in The Bronx, which has flat-screen monitors, free wireless Internet service, 25,000 fiction and nonfiction books, DVD’s, and audio recordings, and collections in Chinese, Italian and Albanian languages for immigrants in the community. The books in Albanian include works by Helena Kadare, a contemporary pioneer among women Albanian writers, and Milazim Krasniqi, in addition to books covering diverse topics like social science, poetry and biology.* NYPL's five central libraries (The Mid-Manhattan Library, The Donnell Library Center, The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, the circulating collections of the Science, Industry and Business Library, and the circulating collections of the Library for the Performing Arts) are all in or near midtown Manhattan and offer a wide range of in-depth collections, programs, and services, including the renowned Picture Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library and the Media Center at Donnell. Telephone Reference Service The New York Public library has a telephone-reference system that was organized as a separate library unit in 1968. Few, if any, telephone-reference services are as large or as storied. Located in the Mid-Manhattan Library branch at 455 Fifth Avenue, near the main research branch, the unit has 10 researchers with degrees ranging from elementary education, chemistry, mechanical engineering and criminal justice, to a Ph.D. in English literature. They can consult with as many as 50 other researchers in the library system. Under library rules, each inquiry must be answered in under five minutes, meaning the caller gets an answer or somewhere to go for an answer — like a specialty library, trade group or Web site. Researchers cannot call back questioners. Although the majority of calls are in English, researchers can get by in Chinese, Spanish, German and some Yiddish. Specialty libraries, like the Slavic and Baltic division, can lend a hand with, for example, Albanian. Internet inquiries make up only a third of the questions, but they can take up to 35 minutes each and 85% of total staff time. Internet inquiries come by e-mail (13,398 in 2005) and a one-on-one chat that resembles instant messaging (7,220 in 2005). While telephone calls have declined recently to fewer than 150 a day from more than 1,000, they still made up two-thirds, or 41,715, of all inquiries in 2005; the rest were by computer. Every day, except Sundays and holidays, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, anyone, of any age, from anywhere in the world can telephone 212-340-0849 and ask a question. The library staff will not answer crossword or contest questions, do children's homework, or answer philosophical speculations. Website The New York Public Library website provides access to the library's catalogs, online collections and subscription databases, and has information about the library's free events, exhibitions, computer classes and English as a Second Language classes. The two online catalogs, LEO (which searches the circulating collections) and CATNYP (which searches the research collections) allow users to search the library's holdings of books, journals and other materials. The subscription databases give NYPL cardholders access to thousands of current and historical magazines, newspapers and journals. The NYPL Digital Gallery is a database of half a million images digitized from the library's collections. The Digital Gallery was named one of Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites of 2005 and Best Research Site of 2006 by an international panel of museum professionals. The Library in literature and film The NYPL has frequently appeared in feature films, most often as backdrop or a brief meeting place for characters. It serves as the backdrop for a central plot development in the 2002 film Spider-Man and a major location in the 2004 apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. It is also featured prominently in the 1984 film Ghostbusters. In the film, a librarian in the basement reported seeing a ghost, which became violent when approached. Other films in which the library appears include Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Chapter Two (1979), Escape from New York (1981), ''The Time Machine'' (2002), and Regarding Henry (1991). In the 1978 film, The Wiz, Dorothy and Toto stumble across the Library and one of the Library Lions comes alive and joins them on their journey out of Oz. In the episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" in the animated television series Futurama, the giant brain is confronted by Fry in the library. In an episode of Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) dates a NYPL librarian, Jerry Seinfeld is accosted by a library cop (Philip Baker Hall) for late fees, and George Costanza (Jason Alexander) encounters his high school gym teacher living homeless on the building's stairs. In novels, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005), features a language researcher at NYPL who grapples with her past following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel Heir to the Glimmering World, set just prior to World War II, involves a refugee-scholar from Hitler's Germany researching the Karaite Jews at NYPL. In the 1996 novel Contest by Matthew Reilly the NYPL is the setting for an intergalactic gladiatorial fight that results in the building's total destruction. In 1985, novelist Jerome Badanes based his novel The Final Opus of Leon Solomon on the real-life tragedy of an impoverished scholar who stole books from the Jewish Division, only to be caught and commit suicide. In the 1984 murder mystery by Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys, an NYPL librarian stumbles on two dead bodies, circa 1930. Donna Hill, who was herself an NYPL librarian in the 1950s, set her 1965 novel Catch a Brass Canary at an NYPL branch library. Lawrence Blochman's 1942 mystery Death Walks in Marble Halls features a murder committed using a brass spindle from a catalog drawer. Smaller mentions of the library can be found in Henry Sydnor Harrison's 1913 novel V.V.'s Eyes; P. G. Wodehouse's 1919 A Damsel in Distress; James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953); Stephen King's 1980 Firestarter; B.J. Chute's 1986 The Good Woman; Sarah Schulman's 1986 Girls, Visions and Everything; and in Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumous Shadows on the Hudson (1998). A charming, lightly fictionalized portrait of the Jewish Division's first chief, Abraham Solomon Freidus, is found in a chapter of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Bernard Malamud’s short story "The German Refugee," (in his Complete Stories 1997; originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963) mentions the library, as does the story "Owd Bob" in Christopher Morley's 1919 humor book, Mince Pie. Both branches and the central building have been immortalized in numerous poems, including Richard Eberhart’s “Reading Room, The New York Public Library” (in his Collected Poems, 1930-1986 1988); Arthur Guiterman’s “The Book Line; Rivington Street Branch, New York Public Library” (in his Ballads of Old New York 1920); Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Library Scene, Manhattan” (in his How to Paint Sunlight 2001); James Haug’s “Heat: a Composite” (in his The Stolen Car 1989); Muriel Rukeyser’s “Nuns in the Wind” (in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser 2005); Paul Blackburn’s “Graffiti” (in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn 1985). Two poems by E.B. White (“A Library Lion Speaks” and “Reading Room” appear in Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (1981). James Turcotte’s moving meditation on his advancing AIDS takes the form of a poem series called “The New York Public Library,” which appeared in the Minnesota Review in 1993, the year Turcotte died. Other notable periodical poetry about the library includes Ted Mathys’ “Inventory Entering the New York Public Library” in Gulf Coast in 2005 and Jennifer Nostrand’s “The New York Public Library” in the Manhattan Poetry Review, 1989. The anthology American Diaspora (2001) includes Susan Thomas’ “New York Public Library.” Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote a poem about going to the library, included in his 2-volume Ale lider un poemes Complete Lyrics and Poems, published in 1967 and 1970. Memoirs and essays mentioning The New York Public Library are too numerous to list, but several interesting excerpts are included in the anthology Reading Rooms (1991), including reminiscences by Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and Kate Simon. Other New York City library systems The New York Public Library is one of three separate and independent public library systems in New York City. The other two are The Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Borough Public Library. See also | ||||||||||||
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