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. NYU Libraries holds 6 million book volumes. Its online catalog, BobCat, contains 4.5 million records, including more than 2 million e-books and 53,000 serial titles. The Special Collections Center is 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 more than 2,600 seats for student study.
Residing on the 7th floor of Bobst, the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, offering 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 U.S. institutions and 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 more than 200 New York City labor organizations. Fales, Tamiment, and the University Archives hold over 43,000 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 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 the School of Professional Studies 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 is a resource for advanced research and graduate education in ancient civilizations from the western Mediterranean to China. The Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology serves the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The libraries of NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai provide access to all of BobCat’s resources in addition to their own growing collections of books and other print materials in support of the schools’ developing curricula. Complementing the collections of NYU Libraries are those of the Health Sciences Library and School of Law.
NYU 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 the rapid expansion of electronic information resources. Bobst Library’s professional staff includes more than 50 subject and technical specialists who select materials and work with faculty and undergraduate and graduate students in every field of study at NYU. The Bobst 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 NYU.
Professors whose extracurricular activities include service as editors for publishing houses and magazines; advisers to city governments, 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 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 diverse places such 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 problems of immediate importance for urban society such 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, public administration, and the creative and performing arts.
NYU’s chief center for undergraduate and graduate study is located 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 it 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 13,100 undergraduate and graduate students. 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 NYU may be referred to Mary Signor, Assistant Vice President, Office of Equal Opportunity, New York University, 665 Broadway, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10003; 212-998-2370; https://www.nyu.edu/about/policies-guidelines-compliance/equal-opportunity.html. Inquiries may also be referred to the director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, U.S. Department of Labor.
NYU is a member of the Association of American Universities and is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools (Middle States Commission on Higher, 3624 Market Street, Suite 2 West, Philadelphia, PA 19104; 267-284-5000). Individual undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs and schools are accredited by the appropriate specialized accrediting agencies.