Meeting of the Board of Regents | February 2009

SUMMARY

Issue for Discussion

Space needs in the Library including remote storage in the State Education Building stacks which will be overrun by projected space needs in five to ten years requiring additional storage.

Reason(s) for Consideration

             

              For Information.

Proposed Handling

The Cultural Education Trusteeship Committee will discuss ways to meet Library space needs.

Background Information

Established in 1818, the New York State Library was located in the State Education Building from 1913 to 1978. Overcrowding in the State Education Building became a serious library issue by the mid 1940s. The State Library moved to the Cultural Education Center in 1978.

The move to the Cultural Education Center was designed in part to escape overcrowding.  Still the Library was forced to leave behind a number of heavily used materials such as our historic collections of newspapers and court records and briefs. Our collection annex in the State Education Building (also known as the “warehouse”) continues to serve as the distribution hub for the State Document Depository Program, which was established in 1955.

In the thirty years since the move to the Cultural Education Center, the collection annex has suffered from understaffing making it impossible to properly maintain and service our collections. The annex also contains countless gifts and uncataloged materials that the Library is simply not equipped to process without additional library staff in both buildings.

In addition to the lack of environmental and security controls, the collection is also threatened by the Education Department’s continual need for storage space often co-opting portions of our stack areas for everything from office files and supplies to surplus furniture.

Here are a few examples of the State Library collections still located in the State Education Building:

Historic newspapers

New York State government documents

Court records and briefs

Special collections such as D&H Railroad materials

Rare book catalogs

Untied State federal government documents

Braille collection

German patent collection

New York State Museum publications