How did this happen? An institution as old and august as the NYPL is not supposed to react nimbly to new developments, let alone lead the media companies producing the books and magazines it preserves.

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The NYPL has 50 million items in its collections spread out over 90 research libraries and branches. It's quite unusual in that it serves as both a world-class research institution for scholars and a regular-old city library system kids use to check out Harry Potter books. The system's got $1.2 billion in assets. In 2010, the library pulled in about $245 million in operating revenue and spent about $255 million. Outside operations, the NYPL brought in an extra $80 million in donations, "capital appropriations" from various government entities, and investment income from the library's $680 million worth of investments in hedge funds and the like. In a very real sense, that is to say, the library made money last year. However, while there is a lot of money floating around, it turns out that donors restrict various amounts of it, as do the government entities, so the whole situation is more complex than the average media company's. The main point to take from all this: The people working at the library are working with many of the restraints that would be familiar to anyone running a magazine or website.

And yet there they are, launching an alternate reality game with Jane McGonigal played in the stacks of the library. Or getting 100 of their curators and employees to start blogs. Or posting a painstakingly reconstructed digital version of the pathbreaking proto-musicals, "The Black Crook."

I visited the library to see who was behind the excellent work there to see how they thought about what they were doing. And maybe I was hoping to pinch some lessons for my own work on how to teach old animals new tricks. The Atlantic was founded in 1857, after all, making it 54 years older than Patience and Fortitude.

I'm going to give you the conclusion to his article here to solve the tl;dr problem. There are two things the library has done to create such cool projects. First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees care about the digital aspects of their institution, and the institution supports their innovation. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique of media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers.

The logic of protecting offline revenue pushed most media companies away from aggressively reevaluating their role in the information ecosystem. Something you hear a lot in the magazine business, for example, is that you "can't trade print dollars for digital pennies." That's kept many of us (The Atlantic excepted, I would say) from innovating online. No such pressure exists at the NYPL. The whole point of the library is to be used by the various people who do so. And the logic of delivering what users want leads inexorably to trying to give them the best digital experiences in the world.

My first stop was the Communications department, which produced Biblion. It is not at the main library location but rather at 34th Street at the Science, Industry, and Business Library. Entering via a side door, I signed in with the security guard and took the elevator to the fifth floor. I emerged into the familiar territory of fluorescent-lit cubicles and shared bathrooms that I trust you're familiar with too. These places are like the landscapes of the Western. The setting, though it technically changes each movie, looks and functions precisely the same in the areas of fundamental importance. There will be red rocks; there will be beige carpet. It's the office.