Council Member Hudson asks about acquisition policy; library directors respond

Thank you.

And I have one more question, if that's okay.

Who decides what the library acquires?

Do you have a written collecting policy?

How often is it revised and how do community members, scholars, librarians, and archivists inform those decisions?

The New York Public Library does have a collecting policy in terms, and that is broad for all of our research centers, but what each research center

collects is based on the mission and focus of that particular center.

And then it's not revised like every five years where we're like, these five years we're going to collect this or that.

We really do engage the gaps in our collections, in our holdings.

We really do listen to the researchers who are engaging our collections to understand what they need.

And for instance, the Schomburg has instituted an initiative called the Next Century of Black Studies because we want to hear from

Black studies professors, researchers, what is it that they need to write the scholarship of the next century.

And so utilizing that, we not only are thinking about what we collect, but also what we process and what we digitize and make available.

So I would say that...

Globally, the library has a very specific collecting policy, but locally we are each determining

What are the needs of our particular holdings?

Yeah, so similar to what Joy is saying regarding we do rely a lot on our researcher questions and requests, as well as those of our students and the teachers that we work with in Brooklyn.

We do have a collection development policy.

It is online.

Anyone can read it and access it and see what our priorities are.

I am trying to revise mine.

This is my 50th.

So that is a project for us going into next year because we do want to keep it current because things change so quickly.

And when we first created that policy was when we started a CBH.

So a lot has happened over the past five years.

So we want to make sure that our policy is in line with that.

And who helps us to make acquisition decisions?

We have a committee that comprises of professors, historians, long-term Brooklynites that helps us to make collecting decisions.

Queens is very similar.

Langston Hughes specifically, we do abide by a policy that we are grateful has been completely relevant for the last 40 years.

So there's little to updating that's necessarily for the Black Heritage Reference Center.

As far as for our central library, our central archives,

Acquisition policy is geared towards related to geographic of Long Island.

So they work with families and organizations to acquire items and represent the history of the borough.

And similarly to all of our reference collection, we have a devoted team that's responsible for overseeing and making the decision of what should be added to the collection.

Thank you.

Thank you all, and thank you, Chair.