Somewhere within this building rests a collection whose roots reach back to 1818, when the New York State Library was founded to serve New York's government. This place is one of the largest libraries in the world by number of items held — over 20 million cataloged items in 2011 — and you can feel the weight of that collection even as you stand here. The library and its sister institutions, the New York State Museum and New York State Archives, are housed together in the Cultural Education Center, a component of the Empire State Plaza complex that shapes downtown Albany.
The library's story moves through the city: it was once housed in the New York State Capitol, later across Washington Avenue in the New York State Education Building, and an annex of books, journals, and newspapers still sits in that Education Building's basement. By 1855 the library was open to the public — a Shaker brother from New Lebanon visited in November 1855 and marveled — and in 2014 the institution undertook an effort to discard some of those basement items. Over 20 million items sit inside the Cultural Education Center, one building in the sweep of the Empire State Plaza.