The New York Public Library operates 86 circulating libraries in three boroughs and four major research facilities in Manhattan (the Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library).
You will find over 50 million items in the Library's collections. Of these, about 20 million are books. Remaining items include manuscripts, letters, audio recordings, films and videos, maps, sheet music and orchestral parts, pictures, materials for the blind, prints, photographs, clipppings and more.
The mission of The New York Public Library is to use its available resources in a balanced program of collecting, cataloging, and conserving books and other materials, and providing ready access directly to individual library users and to users elsewhere through cooperating libraries and library networks.
Libraries are the memory of humankind, irreplaceable repositories of documents of human thought and action. The New York Public Library is such a memory bank par excellence, one of the great knowledge institutions of the world, its myriad collections ranking with those of the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Virtually all of the Library's many collections and services are freely available to all comers. In fact, the Library has but one criterion for admission: curiosity.
The research collections (for reference only, and organized as The Research Libraries, with four major centers) resemble the holdings of the great national and university libraries, and the community circulating libraries (organized as The Branch Libraries) resemble classic American municipal libraries.
All these features, taken together, make The New York Public Library a unique and complex institution, wonderful to use but not always easy to grasp. It has been very much a creature of time and place, bearing the imprint of its origins but always, like any living organism, coping with struggles and problems while adapting to an ever changing environment.
Specialized Libraries
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Science, Industry and Business Library 

This Libraries directory of the Arts and Entertainment catalog is your best source of information on libraries network and its individual member libraries in the state of New York. Browse this well expanded category and find web sites,addresses, phone numbers,and e-mail addresses, branches and departments, and library staff that you can ask any questions, ordered books online to pick up later on.Professionals librarians would be able to find services,news,publications,job listings,continuing education and other internet resources. Information on events for kids,adults,concerts,performers and other activities taking place in public libraries also would be helpful to plan your free time.

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