Ben Vershbow's blog

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history. Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images on The Commons on Flickr representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore.

Some of the game's earliest years are chronicled in over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 to the New York Public Library by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League).

As the contemporary Yankees and Phillies clash on the field, here you'll find Philadelphia Quakers, Athletics and Keystones in a gentlemanly mix with New York Giants, Knickerbockers and Metropolitans, and of course Brooklyn Excelsiors and Atlantics. Each one of these images of course has an enormous back story, which we hope the baseball history buffs among you will help fill in through comments, links, tags and annotations.

Also check out a smaller set, Proto-baseball, which gathers images of baseball's ball-and-stick forebears like cricket and Old Cat. Here's "Six boys with a ball and three bats, playing Three Old Cat":

We also invite you to explore the full Spalding Collection on the NYPL Digital Gallery and through this finding aid (PDF) from the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Now let's just pray for the rain to stop so Game 1 can get underway...

***UPDATE*** Picked up by Gothamist!

Oh how we love The Commons on Flickr, without question the best place on the web to explore treasures from the photography collections of the world's great museums, libraries and archives. NYPL became a partner in late '08 and has since added nearly 2,000 items from our Digital Gallery, and we plan to add thousands more — keep an eye out in the coming week for a new set of Hudson River Valley images connected to our Mapping New York's Shoreline exhibit, opening tomorrow.

To celebrate nearly two years of Commons goodness, next weekend (Oct 2-3) participating institutions are organizing Common Ground, an international series of near-simultaneous meetups featuring community-curated slideshows projected against the buildings (that's right!) of host organizations: a visual banquet of items voted up and “favorited” by Commons fans.

Next Saturday, October 3, 6-9:30pm, two of NYC’s great cultural institutions, the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum, are joining forces for a combined Common Ground spectacle at the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturday event. Location: Brooklyn Museum lobby. Directions here.

Come witness a beautiful nighttime parade of images gathered and transmitted from the global Commons network, meet staff from Brooklyn and NYPL, get your hands on some cool Flickr schwag and enjoy the surrounding First Saturday festivities. It’s a rare convergence of online and local communities, digital media and physical spaces. And... it’s free!

As we watch with astonishment the "restructuring" of two American automotive titans, take a look back at the first four decades of their history, a time which saw multiple breaking waves of innovation in both engineering and design, and a steady absorption of manufacturing brands into the conglomerates we now see in crisis today.

Over the years, General Motors Corporation donated photographs and related materials as a public service to contemporary and future researchers, and to create an ongoing record of the company's output. The Library, in turn, mounted these photographs and texts in albums. General Motors was one of several transportation corporations that donated public relations materials to the Library department that is now the Science, Industry and Business Library. The General Motors holding is particularly comprehensive. See here the first Oldsmobile (1897)!

NYPL's latest contribution to the Flickr Commons is a group of 425 images from these albums, ported over from our Digital Gallery and organized into six Flickr sets and one overall collection: G.M. and Chrysler Cars and Trucks, 1897-1938. Peppered through some of them you'll find the ghostly portraits of engineers long gone, and delightful staged shots of motorists in action.

Spread the word and enjoy!

Chances are, if you spend any time online you've come across Flickr. Flickr is a wonderful site for storing, sharing and building community around photographs. It's similar to online photo services like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly except with a greater social focus and tools and features reminiscent of Facebook.

About a year ago Flickr launched the Flickr Commons, a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo collections of the world's leading cultural heritage institutions. Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resource.

We are delighted to be the latest institution to join in this endeavor, with an initial contribution of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections.

We think of this as a sort of appetizer course, a sampler of collections accessible in greater breadth and depth on the NYPL Digital Gallery, and on-site in our network of libraries. Lush images of modern dance pioneers; haunting early cyanotypes of algae (the first photographic works to be produced by a woman); majestic geographical surveys taken along the Union Pacific Railroad, iconic Depression-era images taken under the Farm Security Administration's famed photography program; Berenice Abbott's epic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project; stunning 19th century vistas of the Egypt and Syria; scenes and portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants, the Statue of Liberty under construction... These and more are now available to view, tag and discuss in the Flickr Commons, and are offered as an invitation to explore further on our own site or in our actual libraries. After this initial road test, we expect to post many more images into the Commons pool.  read more »