[LINK] "New York Public Library's plan to take books off shelves worries scholars"

[rfmcdonald]

Continuing a theme from my photo post this morning, Brian Braiker's article in The Guardian from April raises a worrisome future for the NYPL's Main Branch. Can anyone go into more detail as to whether this plan--a terrible plan--is still planned to occur?

There is a quote by John Milton engraved over the entrance to the main reading room at the New York Public Library's stunning Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue: "A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."

But now, 101 years after the library was first dedicated, up to 3m of those precious books are to be removed from the central library and shipped to two off-site storage facilities, prompting a chorus of complaints from authors and scholars who say that the institution is threatening its own claim to be "one of the world's pre-eminent public resources for the study of human thought".

Researchers will still be able to access the books, but only after a wait of up to 24 hours. The qualities which inspired the names of the two marble lions that guard the entrance, Patience and Fortitude, have been in little evidence.

The removal of the books – some to a site underground in adjacent Bryant Park, the rest to a facility in suburban New Jersey that the NYPL shares with Princeton and Columbia universities – is part of a gargantuan $300m reorganisation aimed at lugging the central library into the 21st century.

[. . .]

"We are aiming to create the greatest library facility in the world," Anthony Marx, the library's CEO and president, told the Guardian. "And we are as committed as the scholarly community to ensure that it continues to be a great research facility."

But some of scholars have bristled that moving a significant chunk of its five million research volumes off-site to make room for these changes will hamper their research. They met with Marx on Thursday to discuss those concerns.

"When they move a part of the collection offsite, that slows things down," Caleb Crain, a fiction and nonfiction writer who has blogged on the topic, told the Guardian.

"It will force me to plan ahead and request books. If you discover something near your deadline that you want to look at, it might as well not be there if it's going to take a week to get here."