The New York Public Library Free Admission Monday

Free Admission Monday at The New York Public Library - see INFO below. Collections: The Heart of the Library- Built carefully by generations of curators over the past 160 years, the collections of The New York Public Library now exceed 50 million items. In combination with the lending collections the books, DVDs, and CDs that can be borrowed for weeks at a time it is the most comprehensive library collection ever brought together for the free use of the public. The collections have been organized into more than 100 major topics, ranging from Accents and Dialects to Women's Studies with others such as Baseball, Computer Science, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Immigration, Judaica, Theatre, and U.S. History in between. The Librarys strength in three areas in particular is so great that major facilities have been built to house them: The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (LPA), at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem; and the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL), in midtown Manhattan. LPA is itself a treasure house, with music manuscripts, like Claude Debussys beautifully rendered Les papillons, as well as hundreds of thousands of other documents, photographs, sound recordings, films, and videos related to music, theater, and dance. Here, as everywhere else in the NYPL system, high culture happily mixes it up with more populist fare, like a smashing poster promoting the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus. The Schomburgs collection documents the history and experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world; unique among the NYPLs libraries, it actively collects art as part of its mission, including Aaron Douglass epic oil on canvas, Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers. A cigar box label for the Henry George cigar is one of the myriad fascinating items from the history of business found in SIBLs collection. More Info below.