The New York Public Library (NYPL) has replaced Paul LeClerc with Anthony W. Marx as the new president. Marx calls New York City his native hometown, and currently serves as president of Amherst College.
Marx has founded a secondary school in South Africa and initiated the Columbia Urban Educators Program, a program to recruit and train public school teachers. The New York Times speculated that given Marx’s resume, the NYPL not only wants to continue its services of loaning books, CDs, and DVDs, but to play an integral role as a neighborhood community center. Patrons now go to the library for computer/internet usage, job hunts, career guidance, and English classes.
Here’s more from the article: “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. And the need for that is even greater today, even as the technology forces us to rethink how we deliver that opportunity … I think we should be looking to create additional programs that give students pre-school and after-school opportunities. “