The Information Professional

Courtney Eckerle:

The New York Public Library uses National Library Card Sign-up Month as an opportunity to bring in many new library users. To do so, the library implemented a social media campaign using quotes from celebrities.

SmartPlanet's C.C. Sullivan looks at libraries across the country to assess the new scheme for the New York Public Library by Foster and Partner.

The scheme, first reported today by Robin Pogrebin at The New York Times, reinvents the library’s closed-off, seven-floor stacks as “a major new contemporary library within Carrère & Hastings’s neo-Classical one.” Tall windows will open to Bryant Park in a soaring new atrium, reached by a grand circulation zone opening through the middle of the building.

The original designs notoriously offered to relocate all the stacks’ books to an inaccessible warehouse in New Jersey. Yet the new plan still decimates the collection, hauling away 25% of the books that are now within the community’s reach.

"But for all their supposed obsolescence, libraries remain vital places, and many of them are more crowded than ever."

"The New York Public Library recently embarked on a controversial plan to move two to three million books off-site.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system sometime last year. It had been used to request books for more than a century. The New York Public Library opened in 1911 and that pneumatic call system had changed little since then. You still filled out a slip, and you still turned that slip over to a clerk, who would load it into a metal cartridge. The cartridge would be driven by air pressure to a station down in the stacks, where another clerk would retrieve your book, which was then sent back up to the call desk by a dumbwaiter. In recent years, this procedure would take about 20 minutes. In decades past, I’m told, it was closer to five."