Spotlight: NYU Bobst Library

New York University’s striking, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, is the flagship of a nine-library, 5.1 million-volume system that supports the nation’s largest private university (http://www.nyu.edu/).The Bobst Library houses more than 3.9 million volumes, 41 thousand journals, and over 5 million microforms; and provides access to thousands of electronic resources both on-site and to the NYU community around the world via the Internet. The Library is visited by more than 6,800 users per day, and circulates almost one million books annually.

Bobst Library (http://library.nyu.edu/) offers three specialized reference centers, 28 miles of open stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. Bobst’s Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year. The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.

Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.

Beyond Bobst, the library of the renowned Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences focuses on research-level material in mathematics, computer science, and related fields, and the Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts houses the rich collections that support the research and curricular needs of the Institute’s graduate programs in art history and archaeology. The Jack Brause Real Estate Library at the Real Estate Institute is the most comprehensive facility of its kind, designed to meet the information needs of the entire real estate community. Complementing the collections of the Division of Libraries are the Frederick L. Ehrman Medical Library of NYU’s School of Medicine, the Dental Center’s Waldman Memorial Library and the Law Library that serves the programs of the School of Law.

Michael Stoller
NYU