Upheaval at the New York Public Library

Construction ahead of collections?

One of my favorite libraries for research looks horribly endangered, according to this story in The Nation.

In July 2010, Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian literature at Arizona State University, sent an impassioned missive to Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, to protest the closure of the NYPL¹s Slavic and Baltic division. It "was one of the best places to work in the world," she wrote.

Indeed, in the universe of Russian studies, the Slavic division was legendary. "I recall [it] as an agreeably dim sort of place, with a faintly reverential, almost cathedral-like ambience," George Kennan said in 1987.

Among its 750,000 items are the first book printed in Moscow, the "Anonymous" Gospels; a first edition of Tolstoy¹s War and Peace; and John Reed¹s collection of broadsides and posters from the Russian Revolution.

Trotsky and Nabokov toiled in the division¹s reading room. Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev made visits of tribute.

Eleven weeks after Hilde Hoogenboom's letter was sent, a senior NYPL official replied on LeClerc¹s behalf: "If I may put this matter into its sadly grim financial context, in the last two fiscal years our budget has been reduced by $20 million and our workforce by 300 positions. While we recognized and prized the special cultural and scholarly resource that was the Slavic Reading Room, we simply could no longer afford to operate it."

 (It reminds me of the letter I received from Yale when I applied for a minor research grant -- they had lost an uncounted fortune -- in the Madoff scam, I gathered -- and couldn't afford anything like that any more.) 

The New York Public Library, which comprises four research libraries and eighty-seven branch libraries, has seen other cutbacks as well. Since 2008 its workforce has been reduced by 27 percent. In a recent newsletter to library supporters, the institution reported that its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs had been slashed by 26 percent.

And this is the Believe It or Not moment.

Despite these austerity measures, NYPL executives are pushing ahead with a gargantuan renovation of the Forty-second Street library, the crown jewel of the system. The details of the Central Library Plan (CLP) are closely guarded, but it has already sparked criticism among staff members, who worry that the makeover would not only weaken one of the world¹s great libraries but mar the architectural integrity of the landmark building on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, following the Wall Street billionaire¹s gift of $100 million.

Mr. S.A.S. is obviously no Andrew Carnegie.  Can't he have given the money for the preservation of collections, instead of wanting his name plastered all over the iconic building?

I see that (a) he was in the Skull and Bones Society with GWB
(b) he was head of Lehman Brothers

Say no more.