Albany

Deep in the bowels of the state Education Building, in dungeon-like stacks of the old State Library that loom seven floors below the building's striking colonnade of white marble along Washington Avenue, a debate about what matters most to New Yorkers is quietly being waged far from the public eye.

The State Library, founded in 1818, moved the bulk of its 20 million books and printed items in 1978 into the newly built Cultural Education Center on Madison Avenue at the southern end of Empire State Plaza that houses the State Library, State Museum and State Archives. But acres of antiquarian books, old newspapers and arcane journals were left behind in the Education Building's subterranean stacks.

It is an eerie bibliophile's netherworld, accessible by cramped cages of creaky service elevators, dark and cool and redolent of mildew, old leather bindings and sloughing paper that litters the floor like snowflakes. There is no climate control among miles of metal shelves, and accessing the hundreds of thousands of volumes is an arduous task. From the time a patron requests a book at the State Library, it typically takes two days to retrieve. A clerk drives a van four blocks around the Plaza, descends into the stacks, hunts among the haphazard holdings and drives back with the book.

Now, following years of State Library budget cuts and staff reductions, coupled with ballooning bureaucratic paperwork generated by the state Education Department, the stacks are being rapidly emptied out. The culling exercise is forcing some tough calls about what to save and what to shred. The state prefers to use the term recycling.

State officials said they are trying to ensure that they're not trashing something valuable or one-of-a-kind by checking if hard copies are stored in other libraries or if a digitized version exists. They also try to find a new home for books by donating them to other libraries, or by selling items on eBay. Their rationale is that the gleaning project, accelerated recently after years of tepid efforts, will improve efficiency for patrons and make the best use of strained resources.

Alas, Aldous Huxley's 1939 novel, "After Many A Summer Dies the Swan," a caustic satire of a Hollywood millionaire's desire to live forever, printed in three volumes of Braille in 1940, is headed to pulp. The Huxley is among thousands of volumes of Braille books published between 1900 and 1995 — the Holy Bible, novels by Zane Grey and classic works by Eliot, Hawthorne and Dickens among them — that are being jettisoned. A few may end up in some Third World country as a last-ditch donation effort if there are any takers for the musty old books printed on embossed paper in a tactile writing system used by the blind and visually impaired.

The Braille books were deemed surplus and expendable, despite the fact that there are nearly 15,000 active users of the State Library's Talking Book and Braille Library.

"There are probably thousands of copies of these Braille books out there and they're taking up prime storage space," said State Librarian Bernard Margolis, who led a tour of the stacks on Tuesday and discussed the large-scale weeding-out operation. "We don't have the luxury of keeping everything anymore."

There has been opposition to this effort during the content review stage among some librarians who are print purists, opposed to tossing originals even if the book has been digitized or exists elsewhere. "Their voices haven't prevailed," said Margolis, who took over in 2009 after 11 years as president of the Boston Public Library, the nation's oldest. He was ousted after a political clash with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Margolis defied the mayor's order to filter Internet content on the library's public computers, and the two had feuded over library funding.

Staffers who initially embraced Margolis cooled to him after he restored Saturday hours at the State Library in 2010 following a 37-year hiatus. His leadership has been hampered by a diagnosis of an aggressive type of blood cancer that has required him to shuttle regularly to Boston over the past three years for treatment.

"I have nothing to hide here," Margolis said. "This is transparent. We're in the information business."

Yet none of the librarians opposed to the shredding would comment on the record, fearful of retribution and muzzled by a strict policy of the Cuomo administration that forbids state employees from speaking to the media. Others familiar with the collections said the debate over what to dump is not clear-cut.

"It's a constant problem of what you keep and what you dispose of," said Charles Gehring, director of the New Netherland Research Center and translator of Colonial-era Dutch documents. He started as a translator with the State Library in 1974 and worked in the state Education Building for four years before the move to Empire State Plaza.

"I roamed those stacks for four years and found a lot of useful books, documents and historic journals down there," he said. "The solution in the digital age is to digitize old printed material. Unfortunately, we all have to face reality and make the best decision at the time."

"Libraries do have to weed things out," said Carole Huxley, retired deputy commissioner of the state Education Department who oversaw the State Library. "I just want them to be careful and to make sure we're not throwing out our history."

The diminishment of the mighty Empire State — its resplendent past symbolized in the soaring Beaux-Arts grandeur of the old State Library's Main Reading Room opened in 1912 and now filled with bland office cubicles — is evident in deep-sixing the college catalog collection.

For decades, librarians acquired, organized and cared for tens of thousands of illustrated color catalogs, known as viewbooks, published by hundreds of college and universities across New York and the country for marketing purposes. At the time, when resources seemed limitless, the college catalog grew so vast it encompassed row after row of metal shelves as far as the eye could see, a warehouse worth of long-lost academia.

Now, college viewbooks from schools outside New York are bound for the shredder. "Why are we still saving these?" Margolis asked as he riffled the pages of catalogs for Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio (1973), Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich. (1971) and Doane College in Crete, Neb. (1973).

The weightiest challenge is what to do with 17,000 square feet of old newspapers, including dozens from outside New York state. Many ceased publication long ago. There is the Washington Globe, a semiweekly from the 1830s, and the Washington National Observer from the 1850s. There are stacks of defunct papers from 19th-century Boston, including the New England Palladium, Boston Investigator, Boston Evening Gazette, New England Galaxy and Boston Pearl.

More Information Declining State Library staff 2009: 145 2010: 121 2011: 105 2012: 91 Source: State Library See More Collapse

Limited storage and resources will result in jettisoning newspapers from outside the state if they are unable to find libraries or archives that will take them. Digitizing them is cost-prohibitive. Funding was discontinued in 2007 for the New York State Newspaper Project, which microfilmed more than 4.37 million pages from among 10,537 New York state newspapers during 20 years by State Library employees.

One collection that will be saved are thousands of bound volumes of the New York State Supreme Court Cases and Briefs dating back more than three centuries, which have not been digitized and are still regularly requested by legal researchers.

"This is the mother lode of our legal system," Margolis said. He has authorized $30,000 to pay a company to move the books to the State Library, which will take two weeks.

Margolis said he does not take pleasure in throwing out books, but the State Library must respond to reductions in staff and resources.

"I feel like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill," he said.

pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl