NY Times: “NASA’s Largest Library is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts”
A new NY Times article about the closing of the Goddard Space Flight Center Library closing.
From the Article:
T
he Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.
Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.
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The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three — at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — will remain open.
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After Friday, employees who need research help can use a digital “Ask a Librarian” service, or use an inter-library loan service to check out books from other federal-agency libraries, Mr. Richmond said.
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The Space Science Data Coordinated Archive has been offline for several months. With it inaccessible and the library closing, NASA is losing both history and vital information for future space missions, according to Dr. [Dave] Williams [a planetary scientist who left Goddard this year under an early retirement program] and other scientists.
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The union representing Goddard employees said researchers have been unable to access online journals that they rely on to do their work.
Learn More, Read the Complete Article (approx. 1250 words)
See Also: Closing The GSFC Library (via NASA Watch)
See Also: 2016 Federal Library/Information Centers of the Year (via LOC)
Large Library/Information Center(with a staff of 11 or more federal and/or contract employees):NASA Goddard Information and Collaboration Center, Greenbelt, Maryland,
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Data Files, Libraries, News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.


he Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.