New York University Libraries
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, is the flagship of an eight-library system that provides access to the world’s scholarship. The Division of Libraries holds 5.8 million book volumes. Its online catalog, BobCat, contains 4.5 million records, including more than 2 million e-books, over 96,000 journals, 261,893 serial titles, and 232,845 audio and video recordings. The special collections are uniquely strong in the performing arts, radical and labor history, and the history of New York and its avant-garde culture. Bobst Library serves as a center for the NYU community’s intellectual life and offers approximately 3,000 seats for student study.
The Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, and it resides on the 7th floor of Bobst with advanced technology to support the newest modes of music listening. 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. The Data Services Lab provides expert staff and access to software, statistical computing, geographical information systems analysis, data collection resources, and data management services in support of quantitative research at NYU.
The Fales Library, a special collection within Bobst Library, is home to the unparalleled Fales Collection of English and American Literature; the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection, the country’s largest trove of cookbooks, food writing, pamphlets, paper, and archives, dating from the 1790s; and the Downtown Collection, an extraordinary multimedia archive documenting the avant-garde New York art world since 1975. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, the country’s leading repository of research materials in the history of left politics and labor. Two fellowship programs bring scholars from around the world to Tamiment to explore the history of the Cold War and its wide-ranging impact on American institutions and to research the history of progressive social policies and promote public discussion of their role in our society. Tamiment’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives contain, among other resources, the archives of the Jewish Labor Committee and of more than 200 New York City labor organizations. Fales, Tamiment, and the University Archives hold over 41,000 linear feet of archival materials.
Beyond Bobst, the library of the renowned Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences focuses on research-level material in mathematics, computer science, and related fields. The Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) 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 Library at SPS Midtown, the most comprehensive facility of its kind, serves the information needs of every sector of the real estate community. The Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) is a resource for advanced research and graduate education in ancient civilizations from the western Mediterranean to China. The Bern Dibner Library serves the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The libraries of NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai provide access to all the resources in BobCat and are building their own collections of books and other print materials in support of the schools’ developing curricula. Complementing the collections of the Division of Libraries are those of the Health Sciences Library and School of Law.
The NYU Division of Libraries continually enhances its student and faculty services and expands its research collections, responding to the extraordinary growth of the University’s academic programs in recent years and to the rapid expansion of electronic information resources. Bobst Library’s professional staff includes more than 38 subject specialists who select materials and work with faculty and graduate students in every field of study at NYU. The staff also includes specialists in undergraduate outreach, instructional services, preservation, geospatial information, digital information, scholarly communication, intellectual property, and more.
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; advisers to city government, banks, school systems, and social agencies; and 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 coursework 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. NYU 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. NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, located in downtown Brooklyn, connects academics with creative research and technology in the burgeoning Tech Triangle and is just a short subway ride away from Washington Square.
University housing is comprised of nearly 2,100 units housing eligible faculty and administration, and University student residence halls accommodate nearly 12,000 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 Mary Signor, executive director, Office of Equal Opportunity, New York University, 726 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003; 212-998-2352. Inquiries may also be referred to the director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, US 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; 267-284-5000). Individual undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs and schools are accredited by the appropriate specialized accrediting agencies.