Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Collections & Curatorial Units > The Irma and Paul Milstein Division

E-mail Reference Service

Please submit your reference inquiries using the E-mail Reference Form.

This service is heavily used, so we ask you to note the following:

If you live in New York City
If you live or work in the five boroughs, we invite you to visit us in midtown Manhattan at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street (Room 121) where our reference staff will be available to guide you to sources of information for your topic.

This is not a research service
We regret that our small staff can only respond to questions that might be quickly answered and that we cannot do extensive research in response to e-mail requests.  Your inquiry may already be answered on our Frequently Asked Questions page. For a more complete explanation of the services we can provide, please see our Reference Correspondence Policy.  The Library has a fee-based information service, NYPL Express, which is available to correspondents with greater research needs.

Have you checked the online catalog?
All of the book and most of the periodical collections of the Milstein Division are listed in the Research Libraries online catalog, CATNYP.  You may find what you are looking for by searching the online catalog.

Search the World Wide Web
Many questions can be answered by doing Web searches. If you are uncertain about where to start, look at the Milstein Division Web pages on Selected Internet Resources in Genealogy, U.S. History, and New York City History.

Be as precise as possible in stating your question
This will prevent misunderstandings and delays.  Give us as much relevant factual information as you can.

Average response time is one week
Inquiries are handled in the order in which they are received. E-mailed requests do not receive priority over mailed requests.