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Digital Projects

  • Point: An NYPL Digital Publication

    Part magazine, part digital exhibition, Point gives readers a taste of NYPL's unparalleled collections by showcasing photos, prints, maps, multimedia and more within a gorgeously designed ePub.

  • John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive

    Born the son of an inventor, American composer John Cage died the father of musical invention. John Cage Unbound presents an ever-growing archive of items from our collection of Cage’s original manuscripts—housed at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center—as well as user-submitted videos of musicians, students and performers from all walks of life interpreting Cage’s music. Browse the collections of ephemera, compare interpretations and submit your own video: how do you bring Cage’s music to life?

  • André Studios 1930-1941

    This digitized collection of thousands of fashion drawings and sketches produced by André Fashion Studios between 1930 and 1941 is the result of a partnership between the Picture Collection of The New York Public Library and the Special Collections & FIT Archives of the Fashion Institute of Technology Library.

  • Direct Me NYC: 1940

     After 72 years, the National Archives has released the full set of records comprising the 1940 Federal Census - a milestone event for historians and genealogists studying documentary material of New Deal and Depression-era America. But finding a name among the millions of handwritten records is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In response, Labs worked with the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy to build Direct Me NYC: 1940, a site that invites users to construct targeted searches of the census data via addresses found in 1940 New York City telephone directories. Patrons are also invited to share stories about the people and addresses they've searched, building a cultural memory bank directly out of the pages of the phone book.

  • Map Warper

     The NYPL Map Division is working to build an unparalleled resource for researching New York City history. The Map Warper is a tool suite, used by library staff but also open to the public, to align (or "rectify") historical maps to the digital maps of today. 

  • Stereogranimator

     Inspired by a library patron's art project, the Stereogranimator is Labs' latest user collaboration app, inviting the public to transform over 40,000 historical stereographs into web-friendly 3D formats shareable to all. For the better part of a century, stereoscopic views were the cutting edge of immersive 3D entertainment, and for over a decade the Library has been sharing its vast collection on the web as flat, two-dimensional artifacts. Now, 19th century photography collides with early internet folk art as users remix vintage stereos into animated GIFs, bringing the past tantalizingly in reach with an eerie wiggle effect. 3D afficionados can also create red-blue anaglyphs, which, with the right glasses, recreate the incredible depth effect of these images. After an overwhelming response to the initial launch, the Labs team is already hard at work on improving the site.

  • Music Theater Online

    Based at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Music Theater Online is a digital archive of texts, images, video, and audio files relating to musical theater. The best printed editions of musical theater texts cannot fully provide the experience of simultaneous expression of verbal, musical, and terpsichorean languages so necessary to understand the art form. Using the multimedia capabilities of the modern web browser and mobile devices, we hope to create a better framework for studying these important works of drama.

  • The Shelley-Godwin Archive

     In its initial planning stages, The Shelley-Godwin Archive will present key works of British Romanticism by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The Archive will draw primarily from the two foremost collections of these materials, those of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at NYPL, which together hold an estimated 90 percent of all known relevant manuscripts worldwide.

  • Theatrical Lighting Database

    In partnership with the Lighting Archive and legendary designer Beverly Emmons, the Theatrical Lighting Database is a proof-of-concept version of what is aimed at being an extensive digital archive of original lighting documents.

  • Biblion: The Boundless Library

    Biblion, The Boundless Library immerses users in rare items from The New York Public Library’s vast collections, providing context while also allowing for serendipitous discoveries. The first edition, Biblion World's Fair, contains more than 700 photos, letters, maps and more from NYPL's archive of the 1939-1940 World's Fair. The second edition, Biblion Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley’s Circle, takes advantage of new social media features to spark digitally enhanced conversation and social reading — and gives users a direct view into original primary source documents. Apple named Biblion one of its top apps in 2011 in the education category. Wired magazine praised it as one of 14 “outstanding apps for readers,” and The Atlantic magazine described it as “the magazine app of the future.” We welcome you to browse full editions online or download the free iPad app.

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