The New York Times October 5, 2010 Amherst President Is Expected to Lead New York Public Library By KATE TAYLOR At a time when the digital revolution has cast the traditional mission of libraries into question, the New York Public Library is expected to name Anthony W. Marx, the president of Amherst College, as its new president on Wednesday. He would replace Paul LeClerc, who is to retire next year. The choice of Mr. Marx, a native New Yorker who has championed public education throughout his career, suggests the library sees its future as rooted in the vitality of its 86 neighborhood branches, which poor families and immigrants visit not only to check out books and DVDs, but also to go online, look for jobs, take English classes and seek guidance in searching the Internet or writing a résumé. “New York is a city that has always taken immigrants and populations of great talent and given them opportunities, and the library has always been in the forefront of that,” Mr. Marx said in a telephone interview. “The need for that is even greater today, even as the technology forces us to rethink how we deliver that opportunity.” The library’s board is expected to approve Mr. Marx’s appointment on Wednesday. While the Internet has made it less necessary to visit a library to find many kinds of information, attendance at branch libraries has increased, partly as a result of people going to use the computers there. A study conducted by the University of Washington Information School and published this year found that even people with computers at home cited several reasons for preferring to go to the library, including having access to help from librarians. Mr. Marx, 51, a political scientist who attended Public School 98 in Inwood and the Bronx High School of Science, said he saw the potential for a “great partnership” between the library and the public school system, including opportunities for learning before and after school at the branches. Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, said that he and Mr. Marx had talked while Mr. Marx was being considered for the job. “We haven’t drafted any plans yet, but I’m excited about it,” Mr. Klein said. “He’s got a strong commitment to urban education, a commitment to the city. And he knows how to transform institutions.” The New York Public Library, a nonprofit institution with an annual budget of roughly $260 million and a staff of 1,990 employees, gets about two-thirds of its financing from the city and state and the rest from private sources. More than 18 million people visit the library’s 90 locations throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. (Brooklyn and Queens have separate systems.) In 1984, when he was in his early 20s, Mr. Marx went to South Africa to help start a secondary school for black students, an experience he described as transformative. “Helping to start a college for a population that had been purposefully denied an education taught me the power of access to ideas, and the power of people who had been denigrated having a say in their society,” he said. He eventually wrote his dissertation, at Princeton, on black politics in South Africa. Much of his scholarly work involves nation-building and nationalism. He taught at Columbia University, where he also founded a program to recruit and train public school teachers. In his last year at Columbia, he ran the Early College High School Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Woodrow Wilson program establishes model public high schools as partnerships between school systems and universities. At Amherst, Mr. Marx was credited with several initiatives, including a successful outreach to students from low-income families. Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and a trustee of the New York Public Library, said he was thrilled with the decision to appoint Mr. Marx. “I couldn’t imagine a better choice,” he said, acknowledging that he had been “a little concerned that we could get someone who is just an I.T. specialist or maybe uniquely concerned with administrative problems.” Mr. Darnton said that Mr. Marx, a serious scholar and an able administrator, was “obviously committed to diversity, helping the underprivileged and doing something about the cultural inequalities of life in general, but especially life in New York as a real New Yorker.” He added that while it was easy to talk about making the great leap into cyberspace, actually doing so required well-informed judgment about possible tradeoffs and different paths into the future. “How to manage this transition, how to come out at the other end with a greater public library that is serving the people of New York better, that’s not easy,” Mr. Darnton said. “There will be day-to-day choices that Tony Marx will have to make that will require wisdom, not just knowledge, and I think he’s the man who has that wisdom.” SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org www.hbculibraries.org 404.592.4820 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org Honor the ancestors, honor the children. Register now http://www.hbculibraries.org/html/meeting-form.html for the October 24-26, 2010 HBCU Library Alliance 4th Membership Meeting and the "Conference on Advocacy" pre-conference in Montgomery, AL. The Pre-Conference and Membership meeting are open to directors and other librarians.