New York University Libraries

The striking, 12-story Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, is the flagship of an eight-library, 4.9 million-volume system that provides students and faculty members with access to the world’s scholarship and serves as a center for the University community’s intellectual life. Located on Washington Square, the Bobst Library houses nearly 3.7 million volumes, 34 thousand journal subscriptions, 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 6,000 users per day, and almost one million books circulate annually.

Bobst Library offers three specialized reference centers, 28 miles of open-stack shelving, and more than 2,000 seats for study. The stacks are open until midnight. The newly renovated Brine Library Commons, located on the two lower levels, provides students with wireless access, hundreds of computer workstations, three computer classrooms, group and individual study spaces, and 24-hour access for study.

The Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media, one of the world’s largest academic media centers, has over 100 audio and video viewing carrels and 4 media-enhanced classrooms; students and researchers use more than 53,000 audio and video recordings per year. The Studio for Digital Projects and Research 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 such as the Fales Collection of English and American Literature, one of the best collections of English and American fiction in the United States. Fales contains the unique Downtown Collection, archives documenting the downtown New York literary and arts scene from the 1970s to the present, focusing on the developments of postmodern writing and dance, performance art, outsider art, and the downtown music scene. Bobst Library 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, which holds the Jewish Labor Committee Archives and the historical records of more than 130 New York City labor organizations.

The library supports students throughout all phases of their university study and research, including instructional sessions, term paper clinics, and online tutorials. Subject specialist librarians work directly with students, at the reference centers and by appointment, to assist with specific research needs. Digital library services continue to expand, providing students and faculty with library access anywhere any time, whether on campus or off site. In addition to e-journals and other electronic resources, the library offers e-mail reference service, electronic reserves, and streaming audio services.

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 and the Dental Center’s Waldmann Memorial Library. The Law Library serves the programs of the School of Law and is strong in a variety of areas, including legal history, biography, jurisprudence, and copyright, taxation, criminal, labor, business, and international law as well as such legal specialties as urban affairs, poverty law, and consumerism.

The extraordinary growth of the University’s academic programs in recent years, along with the rapid expansion of electronic information resources, has provided an impetus for new development in NYU’s libraries, and they continue to enhance their services for NYU students and faculty and to strengthen research collections.

GREY ART GALLERY

The Grey Art Gallery, the University’s fine arts museum, presents three to four innovative exhibitions each year that encompass all aspects of the visual arts: painting and sculpture, prints and drawings, photography, architecture and decorative arts, video, film, and performance. The gallery also sponsors lectures, seminars, symposia, and film series in conjunction with its exhibitions. Admission to the gallery is free for NYU staff, faculty, and students.

The New York University Art Collection, founded in 1958, consists of more than 5,000 works in a wide range of media. The collection is comprised primarily of late-19th-century and 20th-century works; its particular strengths are American painting from the 1940s to the present and 20th-century European prints. A unique segment of the NYU Art Collection is the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern Art, which totals some 1,000 works in various media representing countries from Turkey to Japan.

The Larger Campus

New York University is an integral part of the metropolitan community of New York City—the business, cultural, artistic, and financial center of the nation and the home of the United Nations. The city’s extraordinary resources enrich both the academic programs and the experience of living at New York University.

Professors whose extracurricular activities include service as editors for publishing houses and magazines; as advisers to city government, banks, school systems, and social agencies; and as consultants for museums and industrial corporations bring to teaching an experience of the world and a professional sophistication that are difficult to match.

Students also, either through course work or in outside activities, tend to be involved in the vigorous and varied life of the city. Research for term papers in the humanities and social sciences may take them to such diverse places as the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art, a garment factory, a deteriorating neighborhood, or a foreign consulate.

Students in science work with their professors on such problems of immediate importance for urban society as the pollution of waterways and the congestion of city streets. Business majors attend seminars in corporation boardrooms and intern as executive assistants in business and financial houses. The schools, courts, hospitals, settlement houses, theatres, playgrounds, and prisons of the greatest city in the world form a regular part of the educational scene for students of medicine, dentistry, education, social work, law, business and public administration, and the creative and performing arts.

The chief center for undergraduate and graduate study is at Washington Square in Greenwich Village, long famous for its contributions to the fine arts, literature, and drama and its personalized, smaller-scale, European style of living. New York University itself makes a significant contribution to the creative activity of the Village through the high concentration of faculty and students who reside within a few blocks of the University.

University apartment buildings provide housing for nearly 2,000 members of the faculty and administration, and University student residence halls accommodate over 11,500 men and women. Many more faculty and students reside in private housing in the area.

A Private University

Since its founding, New York University has been a private university. It operates under a board of trustees and derives its income from tuition, endowment, grants from private foundations and government, and gifts from friends, alumni, corporations, and other private philanthropic sources.

The University is committed to a policy of equal treatment and opportunity in every aspect of its relations with its faculty, students, and staff members, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender and/or gender identity or expression, marital or parental status, national origin, ethnicity, citizenship status, veteran or military status, age, disability, and any other legally protected basis.

Inquiries regarding the application of the federal laws and regulations concerning affirmative action and antidiscrimination policies and procedures at New York University may be referred to e. Frances White, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, New York University, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012-1091, telephone 212-998-2370, for faculty; to Josephine Katcher, Senior Director of the Office of Employee Relations, New York University, 7 East 12th Street, New York, NY 10003-4475, telephone 212-998-1242, for employees; and to Thomas Grace, Director of Judicial Affairs and Title IX and VI Officer and Section 504 Coordinator, Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, New York University, 60 Washington Square South, Suite 601, New York, NY 10012-1019, telephone 212-998-4403, for students. Inquiries may also be referred to the director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, U.S. Department of Labor.

New York University is a member of the Association of American Universities and is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools (Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, 3624 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; 215-662-5606). Individual undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs and schools are accredited by the appropriate specialized accrediting agencies.

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