NYPL’s New Shared Collection Catalog

Image of the New York Public Library's Rose Reading Room

Patrons in the Rose Reading Room of NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Photo is © Moody Man, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The New York Public Library’s new shared collection catalog is live with a new user-friendly interface. Use it to explore NYPL’s collection as well as the holdings shared by NYPL, Columbia, and Princeton in the ReCAP storage facility.

Requests for items in the shared catalog will be delivered for pick-up at NYPL research library sites. (For NYPL-owned items, pick-up locations are all research libraries: Schwarzman, SIBL, Schomburg, and Library for the Performing Arts. For Columbia- and Princeton-owned items, Schwarzman is currently the only pick-up site, with delivery to the other research libraries coming soon.) Any GC affiliate with an NYPL barcode and PIN can use their NYPL credentials to request books from the shared catalog. Additionally, users can place requests for excerpts of NYPL and ReCAP materials, which are then scanned and delivered by email.

Of course, the Graduate Center community may continue to use the GC’s interlibrary loan service, with GC network account credentials, for pickup at the GC Library.  GC interlibrary loan users receive the same 120-day loans extended to GC users (with active NYPL extended borrowing privileges) at NYPL research libraries, and they may also request the same 50-page excerpts of NYPL and ReCAP items (or items from any other library) through GC interlibrary loan.

The two request and retrieval systems offer GC borrowers a choice of delivery locations and a choice of library systems and library credentials to use. Use the system that best suits your research needs and habits!

About the Author

Prof. Polly Thistlethwaite is CUNY's Interim University Dean for Library Services.