Council Member Hudson asks about cataloging and digitization; library directors respond

Thank you.

And with that, I'll turn it to Councilmember Hudson for questions, followed by Councilmember Thomas Henry.

Thank you so much, and thank you all for your testimony.

I do think I've found recently, sorry, I'm over here, not recently, in the last few years, one of my mother's old yearbooks.

So I will definitely follow up with you.

On that.

So I'd like to ask just a question with regards to the percentage of your research collections that are fully cataloged or processed and discoverable to the public.

What percentage of significant collections has been digitized and how do you decide what gets digitized first?

We have about 55 million items, and they are housed across dozens of different divisions.

So I want to make sure we get you the right numbers on the cataloging question, but it is an incredibly complex question.

In many cases, very significant portions of our collection are cataloged and accessible.

In other places, especially with particular kinds of formats and special collections, we have more challenges around this.

To the point you asked, the question you asked earlier about things that we would use funding for, it is very difficult to get funding for back cataloging materials.

It is not, as they say, the sexiest thing to ask for.

A lot of things around our collection care description are among the more challenging things for us to get funding for.

The digitization question is a really interesting one.

The library has a digital collections portal that is accessible online that has a little bit over a million items.

And so if you do the math out of our 55 million, you can see that that's actually a relatively small portion of our materials.

We're very thoughtful about how we digitize materials because there's a balance that we seek through this.

We want to make sure that our collections are accessible globally.

whenever we can.

It costs a lot of money to come, if you don't live in New York, to do research at a place like this.

And if somebody is writing about any one of our collections, we want to make sure that there is not a cost prohibition for them to come.

At the same time, we believe very strongly in our in-person operations.

We believe very strongly that we want to support people coming to the library, which is why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on research fellowships so that people can come and have that remarkable experience of having materials accessible

in our reading room.

We're also limited by copyright law and the materials that we are able to put online for that.

And so for that reason, you know, we think very, very carefully about the things that we do digitize because we want to make sure if we are digitizing that we can make them widely available.

We're happy to get back to you with more numbers and the details.

Great, thank you.

And I just want to add that was mentioned in the introduction that the Library for the Performing Arts just got this incredible gift of $60 million, the largest gift in the Performing Arts Library history by an anonymous donor.

And all of that is going to, we're going to engage in the next five years in actually a program to digitize a lot more of our collection.

And so the idea is actually also to make that available to anyone and also improve the experience.

So I think in the next five years,

Julie mentioned we have about over a million items digitized.

We're going to see that number go up.

And it will focus on items from the Library for Performing Arts collection, but we're going to set up systems that are going to be available to all the different research libraries.

So I think we will see that number increase.

But also, as Julie said, I think the in-person experience is also very special, so it's important to look at both of these.

I'm starting to feel a way about the $60 million, but that's fine.

So for Langston Hughes specifically, we are a smaller collection.

So for us, we prioritize digitizing anything that was deteriorating, which for us was VHSs.

So the majority of our VHS collection has been digitized.

And as far as our central library, we would say about 15 to 20% of our materials have been digitized, and about 70% is cataloged and accessible under our Queens Archive program.

Unfortunately, I do not have specific numbers for digitization, but I can always find that.

The majority of our archival collections are at least minimally processed, so people can see descriptions of those.

We tend to digitize materials that are fragile, that are not easy to be used, so that we can provide greater access to our patrons.

We also tend to prioritize collections that are at risk of obsolescence, so analog, audio tape and video tape and things like that.

We rely, of course, on grant funding to be able to digitize those materials.

Another thing that we do, because we do realize how important it is to have

more materials be available online is that we've created workflows within ourselves and within our department to add materials that we digitize for patron requests to our digital collections.

So whatever we do ourselves, we are able to create metadata and

build on our collection in that way rather than waiting for funding for a larger collection.

So just little ways that help.

We really try to do that.