posted 01-10-2026 10:03 PM               

• The physical library space at Goddard is closing as part of a long-planned facilities consolidation approved in 2022 under the previous administration.

• NASA researchers will continue to have access to the scientific information and resources they need to do their work.

• NASA follows a deliberate process to evaluate materials, ensuring they are digitized, transferred to other libraries, or otherwise preserved for historical purposes.

As part of a Goddard-wide campus transformation effort, all in-person library services at Building 21 at the Greenbelt location were paused on Dec. 9, 2025. Those services include collection checkout capabilities (books and bound journals), reference desk support, etc. The pause in services will allow library staff to conduct a comprehensive 60-day assessment of the NASA Enterprise collection, which will determine which materials to retain for continued agency use, and which items will be made available through the formal General Services Administration (GSA) disposition process. This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property.

The Goddard community does have and will continue to have access to books via the federal interlibrary loan process, uninterrupted access to current digital subscriptions to technical journals, and other digital content. Also, throughout the pause in in-person services, the community will also maintain access to "Ask a Librarian," a streamlined, digital method for NASA researchers to access the digital collection. The collaboration and work spaces within the library areas remain open currently, but will close effective Jan. 2, 2026.

posted 01-11-2026 02:43 PM            

I want to chalk up NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman misguided explanation for the closing of NASA's research library at the Goddard Space Center to his being new to the job and to the poor advice that he has received from his staff. His public statement regarding the library, released on X, is patently false and must be challenged.

The rapid and haphazard shutdown of the library at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, reported on by The New York Times, decimated this valuable collection housed at NASA's largest research library. This was not part of some "long-planned facilities consolidation" as Isaacman claims. The Goddard Master Plan, written in 2022, does not call for the library's closure. Building 21, which houses the library, was scheduled for renovation, not elimination.

Isaacman goes on to say that "NASA researchers will continue to have access to the scientific information and resources they need to do their work." That's simply not true. Much of the material that was available in the library in Greenbelt, Maryland, is copyrighted or unique out-of-print material that cannot or has not been digitized and will no longer be available to researchers.

The Goddard facility was a central site for collections from other NASA libraries. The most recent additions have come from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and the NASA headquarters libraries.

NASA's press secretary Bethany Stevens went beyond Isaacman's X statement, again describing the library shutdown as a "consolidation, not a closure." Where is the consolidation? The material is not being consolidated with other holdings; it is simply being lost to Goddard and to the broader research community, much of it is being sent to storage or to the dumpster.

NASA's scientists and engineers shouldn't have to be dumpster divers to do their work. We expect better from NASA and its managers. The American public and the scientific community beyond also expect and should demand that NASA work to expand our knowledge of space, science, and engineering, and not to contract it.