'If you have libraries open every day... people will keep visiting'

The New York Public Library NYPL an immaculate Beaux Arts structure with a monumental collection is one of the best in the world It even earned its place in Hollywood when the 2004 apocalyptic film The Day After Tomorrow showed a few survivors sit huddled by a fireside fed by books from NYPLIts most prized possessions include Thomas Jeffersonrsquos autographed copy of the Declaration of Independence Manetrsquos illustrations for Poersquos The Raven and the Gutenberg Bible Founded in 1895 it has 92 branches across New York and in the last few decades has managed a foothold in the virtual world tooDr Paul LeClerc former CEO of New York Public Library at the Nehru Centre Library PICPRADEEP DHIVARMidday catches up with Dr Paul LeClerc who served as CEO and President 19932011 of this independently run and free for the public institution on a Mumbai visit to deliver a talk at Nehru Centre Library also free on the digitization and remaking of NYPLLeClerc is now the Director of Columbia Global CentersTo start off here is a question thatrsquos top on the readerrsquos mind Is it the end of the library as we know itNo Libraries are certainly changing but they are used to change In fact you could say that of all cultural organisations even educational ones libraries have historically been most open to change So obviously the change is caused by technology But if you go back to the origins of libraries when they began 5000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia the library of Ashurbanipal they had three basic founding principles ndash to collect things to preserve those things and to let people have access to them Libraries chose to have very selective collections and they saw themselves as preserving the inscribed legacy of civilizations Some libraries chose to be open to the public as this Nehru Centre Library is but a vast majority have chosen to be restrictive in accessThat paradigm remained intact for 5000 years or so However with the information and digital revolutions these paradigms start shifting So what we are dealing with is a global information society that is used to receiving exploding digitalbased information which can be made digitally or derived from the hardcopy collections of libraries which can be digitized So the question is Are libraries still necessary The answer is sureWhat has NYPL done towards digitization In some advanced economies libraries and institutions got a chance early on to put their collections online We did that at the NYPL we were one of the five founding partners with Google for the Google Books Library Project We embraced wholeheartedly the digitization process but even before that we did it by digitizing collections ourselves Our website was created in 1995 and we started building largescale parts of our collection into an online format in 1997 We decided then not to digitize textual material but images for the NYPLrsquos Digital Gallery We scanned and archived about 700000 images Four years ago that image database was being looked at between 10 and 125 million times a month There is immense global appetite for online materialWhat according to you are reasons why people still visit librariesLibraries should be open because people are coming to libraries in record numbers Therersquos one great statistic In a given year in New York City more people go to libraries than they do to sports events all the museums zoos and parks Last year there were 37 billion visits which is astonishing If you have libraries open every day and if you had services that people needed then people will keep visiting But if you are not in New York and you need to access the libraryrsquos content you can do that through everincreasing modes What we noticed when we digitized material was that they tend to be used more especially the research collectionsHow would you lure the average reader into a library One observation is that if you digitize your materials that makes people discover what you have and that then drives traffic to see the actual object Libraries with huge collections such as the NYPL are at par with the British Library and the French National Library or the library at Harvard University These have about 70 million objects and usually only a quarter of these are books The rest are manuscripts photographs or maps So one of the ways you can draw people to the library is by putting on display ndash not just the treasures of the library but the things that people wouldnrsquot believe are necessarily part of the library mdash and see them react lsquoOh my God I didnrsquot know they had thatrsquo Our curators made a decision once that they wanted the social history of the AIDS epidemic to be written as part of the libraryrsquos collection So they started collecting vast amounts of material When you let people know what you have ndash and you can do that digitially ndash for free people come to you for those thingsSo digitization need not just mean the transfer of text from hard copies It also means making it more interactive and engaging the curiosity of online visitors Yes You can do that through for example crowdsourcing For instance NYPL has a great collection of menus Thousands many thousands of them from the 19th century many of them from working class people There was no way the library staff could do anything with these menus other than create some sort of inventory They very cleverly decided to crowdsource menus If you wanted to join this effort you could enter different kinds of things that are on the menu and contribute to this general database And people love to do that It was not a history of the elites what they wore or purchased It was a different kind of historical analysisIs a search engine like Google a competition or a resource for librariesWell you ask a librarian something and the first place she is going to go is Google Itrsquos the first effort The Google Books Project represents 75 billion pages Itrsquos gigantic itrsquos fabulous But these are just books There are other things that a library has ndash like photographs Over time these are discoverable through Google but are not part of the Google Book archiveOnce a library becomes virtual what becomes of the actual structure the physical spaceEvery afternoon in New York City at least 100000 children visit libraries after school These latchkey children go the library until they are picked up by their parents after work We want libraries to become community spaces We want people to be present inside We want senior citizens to be there rather than at home alone Librarians have all kinds of activities like book groups special teen spaces with soundproofing to play music and so on for freeThere is also the lsquoAsk NYPLrsquo service If you need information that you canrsquot find yourself then you can just call a tollfree number and get advice It could be ndash How to get a green card Where can I find tax forms We found out that people needed help finding a job So we had a service called Job Search Barack Obama was a graduate of Columbia College went to the NYPL for help in finding a job as a community activist in Chicago One of our librarians gave him a printed book with all the places he should write to Once jobs were listed in newspapers now itrsquos online We do that today not with printed volumes of job places but by helping people search online by teaching basic computing skills Librarians are human search enginesDid you library thatA couple of weeks back the NYPL stumbled across a box of queries from the 1940s through the 1980s that were put to its librarians These have been posted on Instagram since The questions include What kind of an apple did Eve eat What was the origin of bedsheets Any statistics on the life span of the abandoned woman Many of the questions will flummox you but the NYPL librarians have answered these patiently it seems The service which was once meant for customers in person or over calls is still available as lsquoAsk NYPLrsquo online and over a tollfree numberCheck out nypl andletmelibrarianthatforyouon Instagram