Looking at Old New York

I was over at a friend's place the other night and we were browsing the The NY Public Library's Digital Archive. I posted about it a while back on Unbeige, when I was thrilled to find their layouts of Classic Six NYC apartments.

The other evening we spent a lot of time looking at other NY-centric images and prints. The first two images here are from their Moving Uptown print collection. You can see a bigger image and full information about the lithograph above here. And for the stencil below, have a look over here.

We also spent a good deal of time poring over photos of the construction of the Holland Tunnel. There are 10 pages worth of thumbnail images from The New Jersey Interstate Bridge & Tunnel Commission. We went through every single page because that's just how geeky we are. The image that stuck with me most is the one below (more info on that specific photo here).

There's such a vast array of information and images, I could see where it's hard to keep everything straight interally. My guess is that prior to the Digital Gallery launch, a million different departments built myriad web-based projects and did them their own way for lack of an overarching structure to work within. Now with the Gallery and the archives both searchable on the site, it's pretty confusing at times - They are so so so not integrated!

The Digital Gallery is a step in the right direction, but I can't even fathom the task of integrating it all into one coherent chunk. Their search is very poorly indexed. (It took me forever to relocate the asylum image on my own, and then it was by pure happenstance that I found it.) I found myself wanting to have the ability to tag images a la Flickr to make the hunt a bit easier on future explorers. All in all though, it's not a bad place to get lost. So if you're suffering some Monday inertia and your Inbox seems entirely too daunting, hop on the NYPL site.

Comments

[ag]

Well, it might be better organized if the institution actually had any full-time commitment to the project. The Digital Gallery was an effort of a very small team, supplemented by part-timers, none of whom were paid enough. And for that matter, I don't believe NYPL has a line item for ongoing maintenance and upgrades.

It's actually a pretty amazing effort, given the limitations. Considering all the great press it's garnered, and the new audiences it's attracted to NYPL, it'd be pretty cool if they actually found their way clear to funding it on a robust and long-term basis.