NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, is the flagship of a 10-library system that provides access to the world's scholarship. The Division of Libraries holds 5.8 million book volumes. Its online catalog, BobCat, contains 4.5 million records, including more than 2 million e-books, 174,200 e-journals, 281,808 serial titles, and over 163,000 audio and video recordings. The special collections are 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. It offers over 3,000 seats for student study. The Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, with an extensive audio and video collection featuring classic and contemporary works from around the world as well as the multi-channel Feldstein Immersion Room, which provides one of the most dramatic listening experiences in New York. 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 Service Lab is equipped with high performance computers for qualitative, quantitative, and geographical research. The Studio and the Lab are staffed by expert consultants from the Libraries and NYU IT.
Additionally, Bobst Library is home to the Libraries’ Special Collections Center, opened in September 2019 and designed for research into and exhibition of the Libraries’ extraordinarily rich special collections. The new Center co-locates the collections of three formerly separate repositories: Fales Library, Tamiment Library, and the University Archives. The renowned Tamiment Collections document the history of labor, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. The Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives hold the Jewish Labor Committee Archives and the historical records of more than 130 New York City labor organizations. The Fales Collections include the Fales Collection of English and American Literature, one of the most comprehensive fiction collections in the country. The Fales Collections also focus on food studies, avant-garde New York music and art, and American history. For example, the unique Downtown Collection documents the Downtown New York literary and arts scene from the 1970s to the present, focusing on postmodern writing and dance, performance art, and the downtown music scene. Supporting NYU’s comprehensive programs in nutrition and food studies, the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection documents American food history with a focus on New York City; the Dalia Carmel Collection includes regional and national cookbooks from all over the world. The Special Collections Center also houses the University Archives, which comprise the historical records of NYU.
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 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 SPS Midtown Center, serves the information needs of the program’s students and faculty, as well as those of the real estate community. The Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) is strong in Greek and Roman art and archaeology, Egyptology, Mesopotamian archaeology, Assyriology, Central Asia, Iran, and Asian art. In Brooklyn, the Bern Dibner Library at NYU Tandon School of Engineering specializes in science, engineering, and technology management. The libraries of NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai provide access to all the resources in BobCat and are building their own collection of books and other print materials in support of the schools' developing curricula. Complementing the collections of the Division of Libraries are those of the Health Sciences Library and School of Law.
The NYU Division of 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 to the rapid expansion of electronic information resources. Bobst Library's professional staff includes 64 subject specialists who select materials and work with faculty and graduate students in every field of study at NYU. The staff also includes specialists in undergraduate outreach, instructional services, preservation, geospatial information, digital scholarship, scholarly communication, reference services, geographic information systems, 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 New York University.
Professors whose extracurricular activities include service as editors for publishing houses and magazines; as advisers to city government, banks, school systems, and social agencies; and as 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 course work or in 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 such diverse places 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 such problems of immediate importance for urban society 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 and public administration, and the creative and performing arts.
The chief center for undergraduate and graduate study is 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 is just a short subway ride away from Washington Square.
The university manages a portfolio of 2,100 apartments for faculty and administration, while University student residence halls accommodate approximately 12,000 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 NYU protected basis.
Inquiries regarding the application of the federal laws and regulations concerning affirmative action and antidiscrimination policies and procedures at New York University may be referred to Mary Signor, executive director, Office of Equal Opportunity, New York University, 726 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003; 212-998-2352. Inquiries may also be referred to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, US Department of Labor.
New York University is a member of the Association of American Universities and is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools (Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, 3624 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; 215-662-5606). Individual undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs and schools are accredited by the appropriate specialized accrediting agencies.