Título: New York Public Library
Seção: Controversies
Background: The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress), and fourth largest in the world. It is a private, non-governmental, independently managed, nonprofit corporation operating with both private and public financing. The library has branches in the boroughs of Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island, and affiliations with academic and professional libraries in the metropolitan area of New York State.

Conteúdo: The notable New York author Washington Irving was a close friend of Astor for decades and had helped the philanthropist design the Astor Library. Irving served as President of the library's Board of Trustees from 1848 until his death in 1859, shaping the library's collecting policies with his strong sensibility regarding European intellectual life. Subsequently, the library hired nationally prominent experts to guide its collections policies; they reported directly to directors John Shaw Billings (who also developed the National Library of Medicine), Edwin H. Anderson, Harry Miller Lydenberg, Franklin F. Hopper, Ralph A. Beals, and Edward Freehafer (1954-70). They emphasized expertise, objectivity, and a very broad worldwide range of knowledge in acquiring, preserving, organizing, and making available to the general population nearly 12 million books and 26.5 million additional items. The directors in turn reported to an elite board of trustees, chiefly elderly, well-educated, philanthropic, predominantly Protestant, upper-class white men with commanding positions in American society. They saw their role as protecting the library's autonomy from politicians as well as bestowing upon it status, resources, and prudent care.  Representative of many major board decisions was the purchase in 1931 of the private library of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich (1847-1909), uncle of the last tsar. This was one of the largest acquisitions of Russian books and photographic materials; at t

user: What caused controversies?

assistant: A number of innovations in recent years have been criticized.

user: What was some of the innovations?

assistant: In 2004 NYPL announced participation in the Google Books Library Project.

user: What was NYPL role in the Google Books?

assistant: By agreement between Google and major international libraries, selected collections of public domain books would be scanned in their entirety and made available online for free to the public.

user: What year did they decide they was going to start this collection?

assistant: 2004

user: Does it state there reason behind doing the books and collection this way?

assistant: According to the terms of the agreement, the data cannot be crawled or harvested by any other search engine; no downloading or redistribution is allowed.

user: Was the idea succcessful or did it have downfalls?

assistant: The negotiations between the two partners called for each to project guesses about ways that libraries are likely to expand in the future.