If my laptop carried only one Web address, NYPL.org, I could be entertained for months by its Digital Collections, with some new chunk of knowledge or new delivery system appearing every time I check—the books the library ships out to Google for digitization, scanned now and accessible; lectures and readings, linked through iTunes; NYPL’s librarian blogs. It’s alive!
Joshua Greenberg, tall, young, and crowned with a dark mop of curls, has the coolest job in the world. No wonder he radiates joy. A few years ago, the NYPL invested many resources devising a way to digitally photograph, catalog, and upload thousands of images to its website; then it looked around and went, Now what? Josh Greenberg’s job was to figure out what. He was hired at the age of thirty, three years out of a Ph.D. program, and given the title director of digital strategy and scholarship. “I’m trained as an historian, but I’m a weird intellectual mongrel. I come out of a discipline called Science and Technology Studies,” he said. Greenberg’s thesis and the subject of his first book was the history of video stores. He inherited the digital library program, “which had already digitized something like six hundred thousand items. It was this amazing resource, but it wasn’t integrated with the rest of the library. There wasn’t a central policy about what went in and why.”
Well, so what, you might say. What’s the difference between 600,000 fabulous digital pictures of things chosen somewhat haphazardly, and the same number of equally fabulous things that reflected a policy and design? It’s the difference between a storehouse of books and a library; a bunch of old stuff about baseball and the Baseball Hall of Fame; walls full of impressionist art and the Musée d’Orsay. It’s why a library needs specialists in acquisitions, people who know enough about a field to stock a collection that illuminates and explains it. Greenberg had spent his three postdoctorate years working with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, essentially structuring digital information, and had learned the value of integrating it with the rest of the library and, most important, with the library’s users.
He proceeded by starting something he called the Digital Experience Group. The name pleased him, because it sounds like a sixties happening. “It ultimately says that we’re not concerned with digital technology for its own sake. We’re not concerned with the collections for their own sake. We’re concerned with people’s experience. There are certain tools like ‘user experience design’ or ‘user analysis’ that have been integral to the way that the dot-com world works and are just starting to make their way into the library world. This turn toward the user is huge in libraries right now.”
There were fifteen people in his Digital Experience Group; about half of them had come from I-schools, great library schools that had reconfigured themselves as “information schools.” Everyone on his staff had librarian values, loads of technical training, and an eagerness to think broadly and creatively about the role of a library in the digital and cultural landscape. While other departments in the library system are losing librarians through attrition, Greenberg was still hiring (he had planned to hire ten more, but the economic crisis later that year limited him to three).
His digital group started with the basics. When people click NYPL.org, what do they find? Libraries took it for granted that you came onto a home page and jumped from there to the catalog or the databases, but Greenberg said, “In the era of Google and Yahoo!, that’s not good enough.”
He created a webpage he called the Digital Labs, where his staff members could post their thoughts and findings and pose questions, and he opened it up, not just to other library employees, but to anyone out there who wanted to be part of the conversation. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the cyber back room of the library, accessible to all who visit the website NYPL.org, and welcoming to anyone with any level of expertise. “Hey, are you a user? Then your input is invaluable!” it says in numerous ways. It felt like Romper Room, with a bunch of postgrads cooking up a neat show with neat stuff from the vaults of history. Its banner was a metaphysical drawing of a head with a mapped skull and circles going into it and coming out restructured, under the legend “The Process Behind the Product.”
“We wanted to establish a sense that we’re under construction, possibly in perpetuity,” Greenberg said. “As the ground keeps shifting, we’ve got to keep shifting with it.” He cited Google’s always-under-construction policy with approval. “They make a commitment to their users that, ‘Hey, here’s this thing; it pretty much works. If it breaks occasionally, we’re sorry. It’s because we’re making it better.’ And that’s the posture that the library needs to take. There are certain core things like the catalog that need to work. But beyond that, there’s no way we’re going to get in the game and stay where users expect if we don’t always reach for more.”
He mentioned one of the contributors to the Digital Labs, a library consultant who did a study of how young people live on the Internet and how they do their homework. “We came to the conclusion that if we just built a traditional website, it’s more or less throwing money away. We need to take our services into the places the kids already are.” What they were designing then was a widget, a little box that students could park on their desktop or Facebook page, that they could click to bring them directly to what they needed at the library.
In the course of reintegrating the digital library, Greenberg had roped in librarians to contribute to an NYPL blog. The reference librarian with an interest in the culinary arts wrote about menus and recipes. The map librarian blogged about how to get the most out of Google Earth and aerial photos of New York City from 1924. Someone from adult outreach explained how to pronounce Wii, and told us where we could learn to play such a thing (the library, for one). Digital wasn’t something that only the people in the digital group did.
Greenberg was fostering active librarians for the mash-up generation, for potential patrons who could take the library’s resources and create something new with them. “Before, everybody wasn’t publishing books. Everybody wasn’t creating movies,” he said. The trend to create and share, especially on the Web, “is much more visible now. And we have to figure out—what’s the role of the librarian supporting that?”
Librarians weren’t necessarily ready to rethink the library for the new zeitgeist, he felt; and libraries aren’t especially structured to encourage creativity in their staffs. But why should they be different from any other institutions these days? Look at the 2008 election, “where the grassroots has taken on such importance. There’s this real tension,” he said—between the old, hierarchical institutions and the freewheeling cacophony of individual voices. “All this other stuff is happening that resonates with a more active role for librarians. It’s messy,” he said, cheerfully.
Like most American libraries, the NYPL has seen hard times. During the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, when New York City went bankrupt, an event memorialized by the Daily News headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, the libraries starved. The library on Fifth Avenue was dirty. Its beautiful Celeste Bartos Forum, now a jewel of a performance center, was being used as a warehouse for old furniture. Masonite walls divided up the exhibition area, and the lightbulbs had burned out. Vartan Gregorian, the college president who took on the job of its rejuvenation in 1981, described the back of the building that faced Bryant Park as “New York’s longest urinal.”
Gregorian turned the library from a beggar into a queen during his eight-year tenure by courting benefactors, lobbying the city, and articulating over and over again that the library was not a charity but a philanthropy, not a luxury we could do without, but worthy of being lavished with funds, and as valuable to the cultural life of this city as the Metropolitan Museum or Lincoln Center. He took a place that served jug wine in plastic cups to its donors and turned it into a place that threw galas to rival the Met’s in opulence.
And the library is run like a philanthropy, quietly, by a board of trustees and a few high-powered, highly paid administrators. Paul LeClerc, the president an
d CEO, earns a CEO-style salary (almost $800,000 in 2007), and David Ferriero does nicely with half that. Its regular librarians, however, aren’t paid so handsomely; in fact, the NYPL ranked twenty-fifth out of twenty-five libraries in a 2005 American Libraries survey, with starting salaries then of less than $36,000 a year—and that in the most expensive city in the country.
The website refers to the tangle of civic and philanthropic funds that finance the system as a “still evolving private-public partnership.” It’s called the New York Public Library, and the city of New York owns the building on Fifth Avenue and many of the circulating libraries, and pays for the administration of the circulating libraries and their staffs. The research collections and most of the research staff are the bailiwick of a nonprofit foundation, the New York Public Library Astor Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Its tax returns are public, but you won’t find the minutes of the board meetings online. Debate about the future of the library happens behind closed doors. The administration and the board don’t have to slow down for contentious New York constituency groups, and almost everything they do comes as a surprise to the patrons, like the news that the beloved Donnell Library—a branch with a devoted community of patrons and unique collections of books in world languages and films—would be dismantled, sold, then turned into a much smaller library beneath a luxury hotel; or the day everyone learned that the world-renowned research library on Fifth Avenue was changing its name and, oh, by the way, its identity.
News of Eliot Spitzer’s scandal, his dalliance with a four-thousand-dollar prostitute, and speculation about his resignation as governor of New York dwarfed the other news of March 11, 2008: the bombing in Baghdad that killed five U.S. soldiers; the downward-spiraling economy, as seen through the lens of the buyout firm, the Blackstone Group, and the billions draining out of its CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman’s pockets; and at the bottom of the front page, another story about Schwarzman: FOR $100 MILLION, A LIBRARY CARD AND PERHAPS HIS NAME IN STONE. Schwarzman was giving the biggest gift in its history to the New York Public Library, kick-starting a billion-dollar renovation of the Fifth Avenue building and the creation of two new hub libraries. The donation was so spectacular—“among the largest to any cultural institution in the city’s history”—that the library would be renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in his honor.
But naming the library after Schwarzman was the gossipy part of the story, the $100 million, a diamond flashing in our eyes, the fur coat wrapped around the real news: the research stacks were being shifted out of the building at Forty-second and Fifth and into underground storage so a circulating library could be squeezed in. “The average user of our branch libraries wasn’t coming to Forty-second Street,” a library spokesman said. “This new plan was the further democratization of that building.” A million annual visitors would be turning into four million. President LeClerc named the constituencies he wanted to see coming through the doors: “teenagers working on term papers, graduate students writing theses, rare book aficionados searching out volumes, and children flocking to story hour.”
Phrases like “children flocking to story hour” go down like hot chocolate any day. But when a powerful politician falls, nobody’s talking about story time or the future of libraries. You might not notice that a world-class research library had just agreed to make room for children, teenagers, and DVDs; and unless you were a writer you might not notice that writers hadn’t made the list of patrons the library was eager to see coming through the door.
David Ferriero, a distinguished-looking gentleman with gray temples, strolled the marble halls, swinging his glasses. The distinctions between the research libraries and the circulating libraries were melting on his watch, and months after the library announced its new plans, Ferriero had gone from directing the four research libraries to directing all of the libraries.
Ferriero had modernized Duke University’s libraries before he came to NYPL in 2004. I admired him for buying the warehouse full of newspapers that the writer Nicholson Baker accumulated after Baker learned of the trashing and discarding of the irreplaceable newspapers by the British Library, the Library of Congress, and others. Baker’s nonfiction screed Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper was rough on librarians, but it’s impossible to read it without wondering how anyone, especially someone educated and committed to the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, could justify destroying something as precious as the last complete run of an illustrated newspaper more than a century old.
Ferriero saved Baker from a self-imposed sentence tending a climate-controlled warehouse full of old, rare newspapers and took in the whole lot for Duke University’s libraries, where they now rest in perpetuity. For that act alone, he’s a capable steward of the treasures of the past.
But, like library administrators everywhere, he is trying to balance the need to preserve the past with the pressure to speed up technological expansion, all on a shrinking budget. At the NYPL, Ferriero has earned a reputation for his digital savvy. He hired Greenberg, the digital guru. Under his and Paul LeClerc’s direction, NYPL was one of the first libraries to sign up for the Google Books Digitization Project, firmly committing the library’s older, out-of-copyright books while the project was still controversial. Ferriero weaned the library off an antique cataloging system devised a hundred years ago by Billings, the original head librarian (it now catalogs its holdings using the Library of Congress classification system, the academic alternative to the Dewey Decimal System); and he has been at the front of the historic consolidation of the libraries. Not only was he now in charge of circulating as well as research libraries, he was leading the effort to combine their separated catalogs, though this transition turned out to be nearly as harrowing as Westchester County’s catalog migration. A New York Times story in the summer of 2009 reported a scene remarkably similar to the one in Westchester two years earlier, when technology glitches frayed the nerves of both patrons and librarians.
The first casualties of the planned consolidation were not announced anywhere else. The signs were Scotch-taped to the doors of the two reading rooms of the Asian and Middle Eastern Division: the Newspaper & Microform Reading Room and the exquisite Shoichi Noma Reading Room: AS OF SEPTEMBER 2, 2008, THE ASIAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN READING ROOMS ARE PERMANENTLY CLOSED.
The sheets instructed patrons to visit the reference desk or the Rare Books Reading Room if they wanted access to the collection. A similar sign was taped to the door across the hall, the reading room of the Baltic and Slavic collection, which holds, among other items, the papers of the czars, sold by a strapped Soviet Union.
The former head of the Asian and Middle Eastern Division worked just down the hall from the shuttered reading rooms, in an office carved out of the past; it felt like a secret room tucked under the eaves, too much furniture, wooden cabinets and tables piled high with unopened mail. An industrial-sized air conditioner loomed menacingly over the doorway; a few moments after it rumbled into action, its runoff could be heard draining behind one of the bookcases. The room, I was told, used to be a shower for porters in the library’s early days.
Disorder was not John Lundquist’s natural state. He was tall and old-school, with a somewhat mournful bearing, a haircut you might have seen in the 1920s, parted in the middle, a long layer on top, cut close below, round tortoiseshell glasses, a black suit with black textured tie—a refined presence, as if he’d been polished at Oxford, or just come from tea with T. S. Eliot. The mess was evidence of one of the sacrifices the research library was making in order to absorb the circulating library across the street. “Our division has been dissolved. Our reading rooms have been closed. Our librarians have been reassigned. I’m no longer the head of the division; I’m now a curator. In theory we continue as collections, the Asian and the Baltic, but I’m highly skeptical. Our material is available if scholars want it—it’s upstairs on the third floor, and the valuable items are in a locked cage that can be accessed through the Rare Books Reading Room. B
ut as a result of the merger between research and the branch libraries, we have been downsized. The whole library has been drastically downsized.
“Our staff of twenty-two had been approximately halved in this last phase. The retirees are not replaced. That is ongoing. When the Arabic-language cataloger retires, we will be without an Arabic-language librarian. We’ve already lost Persian, Korean, and a number of the languages of India. I don’t see them being replaced, ever.”
His staff has been reassigned to cataloging, not to reference, where they might be able to help the regular staff with the sort of technical, scholarly foreign-language requests that are now being directed there. “There has been nothing about this in the press, no. Obviously the library doesn’t want any publicity. In the view of senior management, this change is, in fact, an improvement. It’s almost Orwellian. They foresee many thousands more people in the building, and that, to them, is a worthy goal. There is a perception that libraries are archaic, dead, outdated, and that everything is now on the Internet, in digital form. We are old, stooped-over people doing old, stooped-over things. They want to lighten things up, they want the library to be active and hip, they want to put in a cafeteria and schedule entertainments—they want us to join the modern age.
This Book Is Overdue! Page 16