Chair Williams asks about staffing; library directors respond

Thank you.

Final question is just about staffing.

So just wanted to know, I'm sure the answer is never enough, but is staffing in these centers and collections sufficient?

If anything has changed over the past 10 years, would be good to know that.

And if you could just tell us about who the staff are in the centers and collections and what are their credentials.

I know this is not typical library, so you might have other specialty staff working on your teams.

Since my mic is closest, I can get started.

So at Center for Brooklyn History, we have a team of archivists, reference librarians, special collections catalogers, art and artifact coordinator.

We have a library page because we want to make sure that we give students who are in library school an opportunity to have a paid job while also learning about what a library is and how it functions, especially in a research space.

We have a wonderful team of educators who go out into Brooklyn schools and manage field trips.

We have a director of programs who does all of our wonderful public programming.

We have a chief historian who is in the audience today who is wonderful and does all of our public history and exhibitions work.

I think that might be it.

I hope I'm not missing anyone, but a very varied staff.

Yes, and if there are any other different types of staffers that she did not mention, because that seems like a very robust list.

I want to add that NYPL is a really big place, and so one group of people who often get kind of

not seen as much are the teams that we call the technical services teams, the people who preserve the collections, who describe the collections, who catalog the collections, the people who make sure that they're in the right place on the shelf.

We have, you know, in the 42nd Street building, for example,

We have seven miles of archival shelving, and every single box on one of those is coded properly in a database so that we can find it.

If one of those goes in the wrong place, we lose track of that box, and that is a remarkable labor.

We also have curators, and I think this is a really important thing to think about, people who not just preserve the collections and steward the collections, but interpret the collections, who bring them to life for people through exhibitions.

And then the one thing I want to flag about our library, which Nativa is a great representative of, is we have so many people who start as pages.

Our page program is robust.

We get students from all across both graduate school and undergraduate.

And we are incredibly proud of the people.

I just talked to one of our colleagues here at the Schomburg this morning who started as a page and made his way up into management here.

And so the library is really committed to growing our staff.

Lots of people understand that librarians are a part of this, but we support almost every kind of career path just at the New York Public Library.

I won't be too repetitive, but for Queens Public Library, when we say curators, archivists, we have one person for each research collection.

So for example, at Langston Hughes Library with the Black Heritage Reference Center, there is one person taking care of a 40,000 plus collection.

We have one music librarian that's taking care of 40,000 music records and documents.

So when my colleagues were talking, they were saying things like archivists and curators.

And I'm like, yeah, we have one for that collection and one for another collection.

So I just wanted to add that.