By Lewis I. Rice

Co-op student David Ferriero was shelving books in the MIT library, a job he didn't want in a place he didn't want to be, when someone stopped at a nearby reference desk to ask if anyone knew Chicago.

The people working at the desk were librarians. They probably could have recited from memory facts and figures about the Midwest's largest city—population total, past mayors, major industries. What they did, instead, was lock arms, step lively, and sing a verse from the musical Chicago.

Maybe this place wasn't so bad after all.

"It was an intellectual environment, but people were having a good time," Ferriero says today. "And they made librarianship look like it was fun."

In fact, Ferriero, LA'72, MA'76, went on to make the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries his professional home for thirty-one years, from that initial co-op he didn't want to serving as acting co-director of libraries. An eight-year stint at Duke University as university librarian and vice provost for library affairs followed.

Then, last year, Ferriero became the Andrew W. Mellon director and chief executive of the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library (NYPL), the "mother ship," he says, in the library world.

A little more than a year into his position, Ferriero is still exploring his vast domain: Four locations scattered around Manhattan. More than 43 million items, including 15.4 million books as well as maps, manuscripts, recordings, musical scores, posters, and prints. (A separate director oversees the system's eighty-five branch libraries.)

It's impossible, of course, for one person to be an expert about the entire NYPL collection, or know every detail about how the research libraries are used by their 1.7 million annual visitors.

But it's clear Ferriero is giving that his best shot.

The wanderer
A visitor runs into him for the first time an hour before a scheduled interview, as Ann Thornton, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library associate director, gives a quick tour around the NYPL flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, whose entrance is flanked by the well-known pair of marble lions.

Thornton has shown off the Hunt-Lenox Globe, one of two known globes from circa 1510, which depicts South America but not North America. She's noted the library offers free lectures and classes to the public—talks on Walt Whitman were given this fall, for instance, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first printing of Leaves of Grass. She's explained the reference librarians here answer three thousand e-mailed questions a month. (One of the few that stumped them: How many brownstones are in New York City?)

Inside the main reading room—which is nearly as long as a football field, or, in New York City measurements, two city blocks—Thornton points out Ferriero. The room is filled with tourists staring up at the ornate 50-foot-high ceiling and locals watching an electronic board, waiting for their number to light up, indicating their materials are ready to view. Ferriero is slowly looking around, studying what everyone is doing. Earlier in the day, he had "trained" behind a reference desk. A security guard notices him and shakes his hand.

Ferriero visits too often to be incognito, and he doesn't want to be. Every day, he comes to the reading room, and other spots around the libraries, to observe, and learn, and make himself known in a place where many staff members still consider him a newcomer.

"I wander around a lot," he says. "I open doors. I stick my head in. That scares a lot of people. But I want people to know who I am, and I want people to feel they can talk to me."

It's a sign of his relatively recent arrival that Ferriero doesn't immediately know how many people he supervises. "Lots" is his first answer, soon made more precise after a bit of research. Scanning the NYPL annual report, he finds that 1,023 employees work in the four bodies he supervises: the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Science, Industry, and Business Library. Each has previously operated independently. Ferriero hopes "to bring them under one umbrella," he says.

"There's been some success and some push-back," says Ferriero. "The trust level is at a very different level than when I started here. Some days, I feel like it's baby steps, and some days I feel we're making real progress."

The distinct function of the individual libraries is revealed in a trip to the Science, Industry, and Business Library, on Madison Avenue and 34th Street, in the former B. Altman department store building. Here, director Kristin McDonough talks about the library's emphasis on practical applications, recalling the immigrant who came in to research the city's best sites for a tailoring business, and the young woman who wanted information about careers in industrial welding. The Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) is located on-site to offer free counsel to small-business owners. Many unemployed workers use the library as an office. A bank of televisions broadcast financial channels, and a stock ticker flashes the latest prices.

Ferriero, McDonough says, "helps marshal resources and garner support for the visions the center directors have concocted. He's very respectful. He's very open in his communication. He's very transparent in terms of letting us know up-front if we're on the right track."

If he doesn't think they are, he has a disarming way of expressing it, McDonough says: "He uses phrases like, 'Whoa, Nelly—I don't know if we want to go there.'"

With his background in English, Ferriero thinks about motivating employees in perhaps a different way than an MBA does. Staffers can solve any problem, he says; they just need the kind of direction that allows them to do their work and make decisions. The root of the word "leadership," he notes, means "to conduct" in Latin. As he talks, classical music plays in his office.

Summoned to the mother ship
People don't apply for the job of director of the NYPL research libraries. They wait to be called.

Paul LeClerc, the NYPL's president, made the call to Ferriero himself. He had considered several academic librarians for the position, he says, but when he spoke to people in the field, they consistently recommended Ferriero.

"He had great experience as a professional librarian at the highest of levels," LeClerc says. "In addition to that, he was experienced in meeting with donors, fundraising, and bringing significant collections into libraries, all of which are relevant to what we're all about. He presented a series of talents, aptitudes, experiences, and personality characteristics that were a total winning package."

Ferriero wasn't exactly waiting by the phone. He had risen through the ranks of academic libraries to become the university librarian and vice provost at Duke. He expected it would be his last job. But he'd been surprised before.

While at MIT, he was recruited to Duke by then president Nannerl Keohane, who asked him to become part of her administrative team. For Ferriero, it was a chance to show that a librarian could take the role of campus administrator and influence the university inside and outside the library. And so the native of Beverly, Massachusetts—a self-described Boston guy—went to Durham, North Carolina, where he ran one of the nation's top-ten private research libraries, presided over a major building addition and a complete library renovation, and helped the university raise more than $2 billion through a fundraising campaign.

Then LeClerc called to ask if Ferriero would consider the NYPL job. When you work in the university library community, you imagine working at certain places, says Ferriero. But not this one.

"The New York Public Library is off the radar screen," he says. "You don't think about the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress. Those are places that aren't in the realm of possibility. So it was quite a shock to be called. And it took me some time to think about the move."

He hesitated because he didn't know any of the NYPL staff and wondered what they'd think of him. Also, like a lot of Bostonians, Ferriero thought of New York as a nice place to visit, not to live. He's changed his mind—today Ferriero is quick to call New Yorkers friendly, and he's enjoying the city's myriad cultural activities, particularly at Lincoln Center, site of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Ferriero's wife, Gail Zimmermann, supported the move though she hasn't yet made it herself. A public-television general manager in North Carolina, she eventually plans to relocate to the Northeast. (The couple don't have children.)

When Ferriero accepted the job, LeClerc immediately placed a call to Northeastern president Richard Freeland, a friend from their days together in university administration in New York. "I was very proud that I had brought in an alumnus in this very prestigious position," LeClerc says.

In a sense, Ferriero has Nancy Caruso, B'52, ME'56, H'00, to thank for his position. He went to Northeastern for the co-op program, not knowing that Caruso, his co-op coordinator, would steer him toward the MIT library. "I remember arguing with her," Ferriero says. "'What kind of job is that, shelving books in the library?'"

As displeased as he was at first with his co-op job, he was even unhappier with his major in education. So, during a time when many young men were enrolling in college to avoid the military, Ferriero joined the military to avoid college. When he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, he didn't think he'd ship to Vietnam. But his application contained a box for volunteering for hospital service, which he checked, unwittingly signing on as a hospital corpsman in Vietnam. Serving on the hospital ship USS Sanctuary, he ended his tour doing triage for the wounded.

The student who returned to Northeastern didn't resemble the one who had dropped out. "I was much more focused at that point," Ferriero says. "When I came back and became a liberal arts major, that's when I took courses in the English department and really liked what I saw." (Both his Northeastern degrees are in English. Ferriero also has a master of science from the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.)

He's recently renewed his ties to NU. In June, he hosted a school-sponsored event at the library, attended by alumni who received a behind-the-scenes tour. And Edward Warro, Northeastern's dean of university libraries, paid a visit to Ferriero earlier in the year to see the alumnus who, he says, leads "arguably the most important research library in the country."

Ferriero "really is committed to library service," says Warro. "It was a logical transition from a major academic research library to a major public research library, to meet the needs of not only an academic community, but scholars at large. He's able to use his commitment to public service and research in a larger arena."

Paper or digital?
At the NYPL, Ferriero is immersing himself in library functions that have been around for centuries, like collecting and preserving books and manuscripts. At the same time, he's adapting the NYPL to a digital age that would have been foreign to anyone working in a library nearly forty years ago, when he placed his first book on a shelf.

"I was very anxious to hire somebody who shared our equal commitments to these two aspects of library life today," LeClerc says. "It had to be the right combination of balance between the two, and David had that."

Late last year, the NYPL announced a partnership with Google that would make a selection of the library's public-domain books available in their entirety online (Google and the publishing community have yet to agree on how to handle copyrighted materials). Though several university libraries are involved in the project, the NYPL is the only public library participating.

And in March the library launched a digital collections website—the URL is —that allows online users around the world to access hundreds of thousands of images of materials they might never be able to visit in person. Three months after the NYPL Digital Gallery was inaugurated, Time magazine named it one of the year's fifty "coolest" websites.

Ferriero, who calls himself a technology person, celebrates the access the digital age allows. But he's a book person, too. In addition to his wanderings around the library, he makes a point of noticing how many people are reading books—many marked with the New York Public Library stamp—on the subway, in nearby Bryant Park, and throughout the city. Clearly, people still want paper.

Nobody knows how long that will last. To young librarians working behind a reference desk, leafing through index cards to find a title is as quaint a notion as using an abacus to calculate a math problem. They have grown accustomed to thinking of a computer screen as their main source of information, and helping library users they will never meet. At the beginning of their careers, they know more about technology than most veteran librarians.

Yet the material world remains a critical concern. "The tendency is to think that everything is online," Ferriero says. "So keeping that sense of appreciation and understanding of what's still in paper is very important."

Room 320 at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library contains some of the most important paper in the world of literature, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. Surrounded by treasures, curator Isaac Gewirtz delicately picks up a copy of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis that was once owned by Vladimir Nabokov.

Gewirtz doesn't wear gloves, which, he says, would increase the chances of tearing the book's pages. As he leafs through the volume, he shows off passages crossed out and annotations that fill the margins. A noted lepidopterist, Nabokov concluded from Kafka's description that protagonist Gregor Samsa doesn't transform into a cockroach, as is widely cited. Instead, Nabokov drew in the book a neat depiction of a beetle.

This is one of 30,000 volumes in the room, expanded from the original collection of 3,500. In addition to the books and the 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts, the collection contains items like Jack Kerouac's crutches and Virginia Woolf's walking stick.

The goal, says Ferriero, is to build "destination collections." Any serious scholar of Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance, is going to want to comb the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.

The curators themselves decide what to add to their collections, says Ferriero, consulting with him only about major purchases. "The last thing I'd do is interfere with the work of the curators," he says. "My job is to support them. The way I describe it to the staff is to remove the boulders in their path to let them do their work."

That support takes Ferriero to some interesting places. He recently visited a prominent stage and screen actor to talk about the possibility of her donating her memorabilia to the NYPL (the talks are ongoing, so for now the library isn't releasing her name). He explained to her how her material would complement the existing performing arts collection, and how the library preserves and cares for its objects.

Most potential donors, famous or otherwise, appreciate hearing the NYPL wants to permanently house their collections, Ferriero says. "I think there's a sense of pride on their part, and delight that someone's interested in their material and there's a future use of the collection for the next generations of folks."

Map to the future
On the ground floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, in a room out of sight of the public, a print from a book on the African-American migration experience rests on a scanner. Nearby, a member of the digital project team watches as the print's image fills a computer screen.

Barbara Taranto, director of the NYPL's Digital Library Program, explains that the materials being collected, preserved, and made available through the program are those that are in high demand, unique, or in danger of being damaged by continual handling. The NYPL curators recommend the items they believe should be digitized.

The library launched its Digital Gallery with more than 275,000 images, each accompanied by a description, and plans ultimately to offer a total of 500,000. Users can search for images and download low-resolution files for free. On its first day, the gallery attracted 4.2 million hits to the NYPL website.

Library staffers reveal the first things they searched for. One, almost apologetically, acknowledges his wasn't a historical document or a work of art. It was the Marx Brothers. He quickly found fourteen publicity stills of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo.

Ferriero says virtual access represents the future for libraries—a long way from the path he set out on. The shift can be disconcerting, he says. After all, he can't wander around cyberspace to observe the users there, like he does in the NYPL's main reading room. Still, he wants people to experience the library any way they can.

"David has been letting people know that this is part of the work now," says Taranto. "You really need to adapt and grow in order to keep up. That's what keeps it exciting."

A bulletin board in the room shows some recently scanned items, including a print from Louis Prang and Company, which produced the first Christmas cards; Ferriero remembers that a street named for the company's founder is located near Northeastern. And there's a portion of a manuscript of Leaves of Grass, showing the author's handwritten revisions. Whitman had crossed out the first word of a line—"Disorderly"—and replaced it. The new line reads "Turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding."

"I notice you're really interested in the Whitman," Taranto says to the group standing with Ferriero, as everyone peers intently at the page.

Hard to believe now that Ferriero once thought library work wouldn't be stimulating. A little later, he reveals another spot in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library that, for him, may be the most inspiring of all.

Behind a locked door, which he asks a security guard to open, lies a map room undergoing restoration and renovation. Though Ferriero doesn't profess a special interest in maps, he comes here every day to check on the project's progress. One morning, he says, the sun streaming through the windows illuminated flakes of gold falling from the gilded ceiling, a sight of almost supernatural beauty.

When the work is completed in December, the map room will look just as it did when it opened in 1911. Except now it will also offer Internet connections, oversize color printers, enhanced lighting, and a new exhibition area.

With its blend of past and future, the space will show exactly how Ferriero wants the NYPL to shine.

Lewis I. Rice, MA'96, is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He profiled brain-monitor entrepreneur Nassib Chamoun, E'84, in the Fall issue.

  David Ferriero
  Photography by Ports Bishop