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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

Q:

What about the foundations?

Heiskell:

Well they've been very good to us. The Mellon Foundation has always been very supportive of the Library, but it's primarily been supportive of the whole library business. Like supporting the Research Library Group, which is an attempt to coordinate the activities of various research libraries. In effect it has done it. We now have a system whereby we can, using computers, find out where a certain book or a certain object is in the country. If we don't have it we can just punch around and we'll find that the University of Michigan has got it and they will ship it to us, and the reader can read it in the library. They've supported that kind of stuff. But they also now have been supporting us very generously.

The Rockefeller Foundation, which has strict prohibitions against this, against supporting libraries--all foundations have to have rules. Otherwise they'd be giving a thousand dollars to everything. So they say, “We're in the medical field,” or “We're in the educational field,” or “We're in the religious field.” It makes fairly good sense. But anyway they broke their barriers and gave us a million for Schomburg, for outreach at Schomburg. That's terribly important. We're going to build something really quite magnificent up there because the city has given us four million dollars for another building, and we have a branch and we have a new research building, and then this new one and the theater. That'll make quite a strong anchor in Harlem. It will be really quite something. We launched that drive a couple weeks ago up at the Schomburg. We have





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