Libraries

January 19, 2010 | News

Welcome to CUNY!  CUNY’s library system is home to 30 campus libraries serving the university’s 20 campuses in a variety of academic and professional disciplines.  

CUNY Libraries

CUNY’s library system is a federation of 30 campus-based libraries and the CUNY Central Office of Library Services (OLS), which supports the university’s libraries so that they may better serve students and faculty.  In addition, many CUNY institutes have their own libraries, including the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies/El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. Taken as a whole, the system has:

• Holdings of more than 8.1 million volumes;
• Annual circulation transactions of 1.3 million;
• Annual traffic of about 12 million people physically entering the libraries and millions more accessing the libraries electronically;
• An expenditure of $49 million annually on campus libraries.
• A budget of $13 million per year for library materials, and an increasing share to fund electronic resources; 
• About 850 full-time employees working in our libraries, including 340 librarians and other professional staff;
• Librarians at CUNY are members of the faculty and engage in teaching, research, publication, and service.

Central Office of Library Services

The mission of the Central Office of Library Services is to provide leadership to the campus libraries and to coordinate their activities by providing central services when appropriate, thus leveraging the power of CUNY as an integrated university.  Activities of OLS include: 

• Coordinating electronic resource licensing;
• Providing financial support (approximately $2.5 million per year) for many electronic resources that are available across the system;
• Operating a system-wide library management system and centralized technical processing services; 
• Collecting statistics about library operations;
• Funding CUNY Library Intra-Campus Service (CLICS), which provides free delivery of materials to CUNY campuses;
• Funding ILLiad™ technology for resource sharing to libraries that have opted to automate their interlibrary loan functions.

CUNY Library Committees

CUNY’s libraries work well together as a system.  In part, that is due to the work of many CUNY committees that make recommendations to the Council of Chief Librarians on issues of library policy, resources and planning. Committees include the Electronic Resources Advisory Committee, the Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee, the library system committees, and the Council of Chief Librarians. The council meets monthly during the academic year to deliberate on the recommendations of all the library committees.