he
excerpt below comes from Forbes/Wolfe
Emerging Technology Report’s recent full-length interview with Anthony
W. Marx, President and CEO of the New York Public Library. Dr.
Marx shares with us some of the unique opportunities and challenges
of navigating one of the world’s largest library systems into the
Information Age.
What
attracted you to the New York Public Library?
I, like so
many New Yorkers, grew up using the library system. The public libraries of New
York get close to 40 million physical visits a year – more than all the
museums, cultural institutions and professional sporting teams combined.
There’s probably no other institution that has the same reach to all New
Yorkers of all different backgrounds. Its central mission is the preservation
and sharing of knowledge and the encouragement of learning, which is a mission
that I believe in powerfully. Its history is great and must be preserved, but
this is also a moment of unprecedented transition regarding what a library can
do and the tools it has at its disposal.
There are
people who think that the Digital Age is a mortal threat to the library. I
think it’s the greatest opportunity in the history of libraries, and that means
that this institution of huge scale and beloved by millions of people is also
at a moment of revitalizing itself fundamentally. In my line of work, that’s an
unbeatable combination.
You
mentioned the opportunity to transition the library into the Digital Age. Can
you talk a bit more about that?
We are in completely uncharted territory, and I think that the Information Age
serves as an incredible opportunity for us. I love physical books, most of what
happens at a library still has built upon physical books, and I think this will
continue to be the case for a long time. But the library is misunderstood as a
repository of books. The library is a repository of information, and a sharing,
and providing of access to information, and guide to using it. The book has
been the platform for how to do that. New technology now enables us to fulfill
our mission at an exponentially higher level. The technology now means it’s
possible to imagine a world in which every person, anywhere, anytime, could
read any book, look at any image, explore any document, or archive, get
curatorial help to understand it, or to find it, and to create their own
products with it.
That is incredible, right? If you believe that the fate of our world depends
upon our knowledge and our creativity to find solutions and to inspire each
other, then this tool is like nothing we have ever seen. This is a moment of
renaissance of what a library can do and the New York Public Library is
perfectly positioned for this moment.
What are
some of the reasons the NYPL is uniquely positioned to thrive in this
renaissance?
We don’t
have so many of the institutional, bureaucratic or political constraints that
other institutions at this scale have. If we can take that opportunity and
figure out how to divide it into manageable pieces, partner with other
organizations, such as tech companies, the opportunities are endless.
What are
some of the current and future initiatives that the library is working on?
We’re
continuing to refine electronic availability with the publishers and authors.
We continue to expand a partnership with the public schools of New York. Now,
teachers in 600 schools can online order up to 100 books in a set from our
collections, depending on what they’re teaching that month, and we’ll deliver
right into that classroom and create a library around that month’s research
topic for the student.
Three
million New Yorkers can’t afford digital access at home, which means they can’t
be informed citizens or skill up for and apply for jobs. They can wait for a
free computer at the library, but not for extended periods of time, and if
they’re a student maybe they can use a computer at school, but students are in
school a limited each day for a limited part of the year. We’re now lending
10,000 households Internet at home where they’re using it for education,
building skills and for applying for jobs. We hope to convince the White House
and the FCC that this is a nationally applicable model given that the digital
divide affects somewhere in the area of 60-80 million Americans.
Do you have
any other programs that are helping to tackle this digital divide?
We have
started a partnership with Code Academy and others to teach coding for free in
the South Bronx and Harlem. We found that when we opened such a program, the
number of applicants for it was many times greater than the spaces we had.
There’s clearly huge demand for these skills, just as there is a huge need for
talent in the tech industry. Encouragingly, the persistence through one of
these eight-week courses was in the 90% range.
What books
have you read recently?
I’m
currently reading a biography of Augustus because my wife is an historian, and
my son is studying Roman history. I read the new biography of Steve Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs, which I
thought was fascinating for thinking about issues of technology as well as
issues of management of change.
I love the
book The Island at the Center of the
World. It’s a history of New York at its founding as New Amsterdam
and discusses the questions of diversity of experience here and how that
contributed to a cosmopolitanism that contributed to the growth and power of
New York. Like many others, I spend an awful lot of time reading memos and
emails.
If you could
leave readers with one thought, what would that be?
I believe we
are where we are as a world because of human creativity. That creativity has
been constrained by physical access to the material that can inform it. Whether
you live near it, whether you have the financial wherewithal to get access to
it, if those constraints were removed, imagine the explosion of talent that
would be applied to the issues that we face! Creativity and wisdom are more
widely distributed than we have yet tapped. And the technology that the library
can help make available can foster that explosion of creativity.
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Khaitan
& Co
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