The score and sheet music collection at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch is an absolute treasure. Recently, at least 120 shelves of the collection were emptied, and the volumes were placed in storage. They will no longer be available for browsing, and will now be difficult to access.

Updated and maintained since 1882, the collection contains thousands of classical, jazz, folk, and popular works for orchestra, chamber groups, and solo instruments—as well as teaching materials—spanning a period of hundreds of years, to the present era.

According to staff, the criteria for doing this was to remove anything that hadn't been checked out in the last three years, and to remove things deemed to be "not popular". This is a mistake.

Public libraries were created in order to provide equal access for everyone, to the best intellectual and artistic works that civilization has to offer, and to be custodians of those works. This is summed up by the following inscription at the entrance of the Central Branch: "The Brooklyn Public Library through the joining of municipal enterprise and private generosity offers to all the people perpetual and free access to knowledge and the thought of all the ages."

By measuring the value of the collection by popularity contests or frequency of usage, and by limiting access, the Brooklyn Public Library fails to live up to those words.

This collection is a unique and vital public resource in NYC, not easily replicated at other libraries, online, or readily accessible by other means. It’s worth preserving in a way that continues to make it easily accessible to NYC’s countless musicians, students, composers, and other music enthusiasts.

We call on the BPL to return the collection to the shelves.