A resident of Sunset Park, who has been following OTBKB for about a year sent me some news about a situation at NYC’s Andrew Heiskell Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Since 1991, this library has hosted the state’s only browseable collection of Braille books.
Apparently, the New York Public Library proposes to place these books in storage at an off-site
location for retrieval by mail-order, and replace the books with the administrative apparatus of the NYPL’s IT department, which in turn is being displaced by the closing of the Donnell Branch.
The decision was made with no public input or due notice, and supervisory staff at Andrew Heiskell have responded to inquiries by phone and in person with stonewalling and disinformation. The following is taken from this Sunset Park resident’s email:
When my roommate and I dropped into the library yesterday, we were
told by some of the staff that they’d seen boxes of books being packed
up, possibly for shipment to an annex in Midtown. The supervisory
librarian denied that any books had so far left the shelves for any
reason other than borrowing, but when we examined the shelves we found
the nonfiction and fiction sections clumped in the middle, with
extensive empty shelf space on each end of the room, as if a hasty
consolidation had been made but excess shelving had not yet been
removed. When we asked the supervising librarian how long she’d been
hearing about the potential transition, she remarked that she couldn’t
even remember what she’d had for dinner last night. She declined even
to guess the month that NYPL trustees toured, and decided to partially
seize, our library.There is so much conflicting information and evidence that a
traditional press release would be hard, but we need the wider
community’s help to insure that all six floors of Andrew Heiskell
continue to provide services exclusive to the blind and low vision
population. Our community already has a problem with declining
literacy and consequent underemployment; removing our Braille books
from ready access could only make it worse. There are 85 or so
branches dedicated to standard print. Surely one of them can house
the displaced IT center.Please find a link to the online version of our petition below: