The New York Public Library is developing and executing a visionary strategy for digitization, digital preservation, and access. The Library stewards rapidly growing collections of digitized and born-digital collection items, and it works to make these collections easier to discover, sample, use, and reuse in more creative ways.
Learn about Building Inspector below.
Explore our other current and previous projects and learn about our Digital Research Strategy for 2021–2024.
Building Inspector
Status: Archived
Launched: 2013
Building Inspector was a mobile-friendly web app for improving information extracted from New York City insurance atlases. We developed a computer vision process that could identify building shapes and other data from georectified atlas sheets. Because the output is good but not perfect, Building Inspector crowdsourced the quality control, inviting users to check the computer's work and identify other valuable information, building by building. Building Inspector was retired in 2019. To read more about the project's launch, click here; to access the project's GitHub repository, click here.
Photo: Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. "Volume 1 Index Map" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Learn more.