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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

A small detail glossed over in the article is that New York City has three separate library systems. The New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library were all founded in the mid-19th century years before the creation of New York City and it's five boroughs in 1898.

The New York Public library built 30 Carnegie libraries, the Brooklyn Public Library 21 and the Queens Public Library 7.

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That’s fascinating to me. Isn’t much of the point of NYC’s boroughs (i.e. purely-administrative divisions of a legally-conglomerated city) that infrastructure that makes sense to centralize/share between boroughs, can be centralized/shared, much more practically than it can under separate city corporations?

Why, then, does the distinction in library systems remain? Is it advantageous somehow? (Certainly not for the people wanting to check out a book via inter-branch loan.)

I think it's just historical inertia. There's no real advantage to combining them since they mostly serve their local borough population. Each has their own central branch which is a magnet for research on various topics. The NYPL is just so much larger in terms of collections so it outshines the others, but Queens and Brooklyn are really solid library systems on their own.

According to Wikipedia, the Queens Public Library is in fact the largest circulating public library in the country.

"one of". It's unlikely to be bigger than NYPL, which has 92 locations to QPL's 62.

It's possibly bigger on number of patrons/items-lent-per-year. Queens has half a million more people than Manhattan.

I know the Flushing branch is extremely busy, to the point where it's hard to find a place to sit inside it that isn't just the floor.

My impression of the library systems is that Queens in particular does a lot of community events that aren't library related in the library.

NYPL services Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. That's 3.5 million people to Queens' 2.25 million.

All three New York library systems are independently run, they're not controlled by the city or state of New York.

While technically a private institution, NYPL is chartered by New York State, many of its buildings are publicly owned, and the mayor, council speaker, and comptroller each appoint a representative to the board.

each borough is its own county with its own courts, commissioners, sheriff, etc. as far as I understood.

NYPL is a bit of an historical anomaly as far as how it is organized.

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