Those who claim New York to be the world’s dance capital have few grounds better than the dance division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: the largest, most eclectic, and most enterprising collection of dance materials anywhere. It regularly films dance productions in the city, preserving the present for the future; it aims to have a copy of every dance book ever published; it possesses treasures going back centuries. And its doors are open to the public as well as to specialist researchers.

For many dance devotees who live elsewhere, a visit to New York has to include time on the third floor of that library, located at Lincoln Center, to view its dance films. Visiting from Britain in the 1970s and ’80s, I learned much about British dance that was unknown back home. Find a screen, enter the online catalog, click a link, and within a minute or two you can find yourself watching Merce Cunningham and his company performing “Antic Meet” in 1964.

[Read our review of a Jerome Robbins exhibition now on view at the New York Public Library.]

Curious how Balanchine’s “Serenade” looked when it was danced in skirts ending at the knee? Here are clips of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s 1940 and ’44 performances. Want to know how Margot Fonteyn looked in “Sleeping Beauty” when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet toured North America in the 1950s? Here she is, in all three acts.

Today the dance division contains the collections of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Merce Cunningham and Jerome Robbins, among many more. Its full name is the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and with good reason: The choreographer donated a share of all the royalties of his “Fiddler on the Roof” to it. This year, the dance division celebrates its 75th anniversary.