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.
Explore our current projects below. You can also find more about previous projects and read our Digital Research Strategy 2021–24.
Digitization Strategy
Launched: 2020
Digitization is uniquely powerful tool by which we can influence the collections that are accessed, used, and drawn upon to create new knowledge. Mindful of this potential, NYPL has committed all discretionary digitization capacity sharing underrepresented voices from our collections.
Friedman-Abeles Digitization Project
Launched: 2022
The Friedman-Abeles Studio was the pre-eminent firm documenting Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theatre performance from the 1950s until the 1970s. The Friedman-Abeles Collection has become one of the most used resources on the NYPL Digital Collections, and their photographs of the work of Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince, the later musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and portraits of the greatest stars of the mid-20th century regularly appear in books, articles, and documentaries.
Digital Collections
Launched: 2014
NYPL Digital Collections contains over 900,000 items. While that is a small fraction of the Library's overall holdings, it is representative of the diversity of our vast collections—from books to videos, maps to manuscripts, illustrations to photos, and more. The service is powered by NYPL's Digital Collections API and is now the Library's central access point for digitized and born-digital materials of all formats.
Virtual Reading Room
Launched: 2021
Our time-based media collections are only viewable onsite as we have no means of providing secure, legal access to audio and moving image items at a distance. We seek to develop a "Virtual Reading Room" that allows limited access to users with bona fide research needs—providing a window to collections that have heretofore been available only at our research centers.
Pandemic Diaries
Launched: 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic transformed lives across the city, nation, and world, The New York Public Library sought to document this pivotal moment in our history. The Pandemic Diaries project asked you the public to submit audio recordings of yourself or your loved ones telling personal stories about life amid the pandemic.
Early Access Viewer (EAVie)
Launched: 2019
Early Access Viewer (EAVie) is a web application that allows research staff to preview and share AMI items that are digitized but not fully described, catalogued, or rights-cleared and are not yet ingested into our repository and available through Digital Collections to the public.
Audio and Moving Image Initiative
Launched: 2014
In 2014, NYPL launched a large-scale effort to preserve, digitize, and create access to time-based media that is at risk of permanent loss through media degradation and technology obsolescence. The Library has since digitized more than 200,000 rare, unique, or at-risk media items.
Urban Architecture Photography Digitization Project
Launched: 2022
The Library has received generous funding from Carol A. and Mark A. Willis to support our efforts to digitize and make accessible our urban architecture photography collections. The first phase of the project will prioritize photographs that are part of the Trowbridge, Livingston, and Charles A. Platt albums, which include commissioned views by Irving Underhill, the Wurts brothers, Hyman Schwarz, and others.
Digital Repository Software Implementation
Launched: 2021
Over the next two years, the Library is centralizing the management of the digital files in collections to a single repository using the software Preservica. This migration will move over 5 million files, consisting of at 500 formats, ranging in size from a few to half-a-trillion bytes, and originating from sources like an author's computer in the 1980s to an NYPL digitization camera yesterday.
As a result, the Library will be better able to accession new forms of digital material into its collections and make digital collections available on new platforms.
The Feminist Institute Digitization Initiative
Launched: 2021
The New York Public Library has begun working with The Feminist Institute in order to digitize some of our key collections over the next five years.This collaboration will allow the Library to dedicate further resources to digitizing collections by women, which will then be shared online, both on NYPL’s Digital Collections site and in TFI’s online archive.
Catalog of Copyright Images
Launched: 2018
NYPL seeks to build a nationally-accessible dataset of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, the most complete and accurate collection of copyright records of ownership in the world, spanning 70 million entries.
Archives Portal
Launched: 2012
NYPL holds nearly 10,000 archival and manuscript collections comprising over 50,000 linear feet of material. The Archives Portal gives patrons access to several innovative approaches to the presentation of finding aids on the web including an intuitive single-page interface, component-level search, and access to over 120,000 digitized pages.
Audiovisual Metadata Platform
Launched: 2018
The Indiana University Libraries, in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, New York Public Library, and AVP, are developing an Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP), which will enable more efficient generation of metadata to support discovery and use of digitized and born-digital audio and moving image collections.
NYU Brown Brothers Collection Project
Launched: 2019
NYPL holds over 110,000 pages of business records from one of the oldest and largest private banking and wealth management institutions in the United States, Brown Brothers Harriman. NewYorkScapes embarked on a pilot project, generously funded by the NYU Center for the Humanities and supported by the New York Public Library, which aims to develop machine-readible open-access transcriptions of the collection records that tell the financial history of 19th-century New York.
RawCooked for DPX Files
Launched: 2018
Creating high-quality digital surrogates of AMI materials can take up huge amounts of storage and be difficult to manage. Our Preservation of Audio and Moving Image team worked with MediaArea to adapt their open source software RAWcooked to handle DPX files so we can better manage our files.
Bibliographic Identifiers for Library Location Information (BILLI)
Launched: 2016
The BILLI (Bibliographic Identifiers for Library Location Information) system is a Linked Open Data platform for organizing the classmarks used at the New York Public Library. By mapping together 19th, 20th, and 21st century classification systems, BILLI creates new connections between our resources and provides insight to staff and researchers how they are organized.
