NYPL Labs
"...some of the most innovative digital library work anywhere."-
Dan Cohen,
Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America
"...showing just how much of a force for awesome experimentation a library can be
today." - Dan Sinker, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, founder of Punk Planet
"It's all part of drawing the public into the library's work."
- Jennifer
Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education
NYPL LABS
Based dually at the Library's landmark central branch on 42nd Street and at its cutting-edge services
center in Long Island City, NYPL Labs is an interdisciplinary team working to reformat and reposition the
Library's knowledge for the Internet age. Labs combines core digital library operations (digitization, metadata,
permissions/reproductions, etc.) with a publicly engaged tech, design, and outreach team focused on enabling new
uses of collections and data, collaborating with users on the creation of digital resources, and applying new
technologies to library problem-solving.
Twitter: @nypl_labs »
Email: labs@nypl.org »
Blog »
WHAT'S NEW
Together We Listen
A community driven initiative to make New York City history accessible one word at a time. Help us correct computer-generated transcripts for over
1,000 stories from the New York Public Library’s Community Oral History Project. Live in New York City? Join us
for upcoming
events at NYPL.
We ♥ the Public Domain!
We've kicked things up a notch with expanded access to more than 180K out-of-copyright items in our NYPL Digital Collections, releasing high-res assets, data,
and more. No fees, no permissions, no restrictions. Learn more
about the release (including our new Remix
Residency)!
"Together We Listen"
Recieves Knight Prototype Fund
Thanks to the Knight Foundation, NYPL and The Moth will make digital audio collections more
accessible by combining the auto-transcription services of Pop Up Archive with a community engagement model that
will involve the public in updating and enriching these collections.
Announcing
Triple Canopy’s 2015 NYPL Labs Commission Recipients!
We are pleased to announce Anjuli Raza Kolb, Jaffer Kolb, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed as the
recipients of a special residency with Triple Canopy to support two commissions that engage with the collections
of NYPL.
New York City Space/Time Directory
We're building a New York City time machine! It's one of 22 ideas funded by the Knight News Challenge for libraries. Learn
more.
RECENT INVESTIGATIONS
Web Maps Primer | Generative eBook Covers | Net Artist Residency |
A collaboration with the NYPL Photography
Collection, Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an
experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and
others involved in the production of photographic images. Consisting of names, nationalities, dates, locations and
more, PIC is a vast and growing resource for the historian, student, genealogist, or any lover of photography's
history. The information has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from
extensive original research by NYPL Photography Collection staff.
Emigrant City
Created with the NYPL’s Milstein
Division of US History, Local History, & Genealogy, Emigrant
City invites the public to help transcribe 19th and early 20th century real estate records from the
Emigrant Savings Bank. These documents that reveal the lives and dreams of immigrants who helped create modern New
York, and, once processed, will offer a rich data set for use by genealogists, historians, descendants of
immigrants, and New Yorkers. Emigrant City is also notable
as being the first NYPL crowdsourcing project created with Scribe, an open source framework for community transcription built by NYPL Labs in
collaboration with Zooniverse, with support
from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
BILLI
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.
Building Inspector
Our latest collaboration with the Map Division, Building Inspector is a mobile-friendly web app for
improving information extracted from New York City insurance atlases. Out of a recent hack event, we
developed a computer vision process
that can identify building shapes and other data from georectified atlas sheets (kind of like OCR for maps). The
output is good, but not perfect, so Building Inspector
crowdsources the quality control, inviting users to check the computer's work and identify other valuable
information, building by building. Kill time, make history. It's easy (and addictive). Building Inspector is in
the process of becoming one of the primary data pipelines for the newly funded NYC Space/Time Directory project.
NYPL Digital Collections
Labs is working with NYPL's Digital Library Apps team on a new interface to the Library's vast repository
of digitized material: prints, photographs, manuscripts, maps, video recordings, posters, rare illustrated books,
and more. This new service is powered by NYPL's recently opened Digital
Collections API and is now the Library's central access point for digitized and born-digital materials
of all formats.
NYPL Archives & Manuscripts
The most comprehensive discovery system for archives and manuscripts ever produced by the Library, with
over 9,000 collections. This evolving platform introduces 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. Produced in close collaboration with the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division and with
the generous support of The Polonsky Foundation and The Hermione Foundation.
Community Oral History Project
Labs is working with the Library’s Outreach and Adult Education Programs, and the Milstein
local history division, on a community-based oral history project that is currently piloting in Greenwich Village
and Harlem. This site presents audio from the interviews recorded so far, including a very early prototype of a
crowd-powered audio logging tool.
What's on the Menu?
The Library has been collecting restaurant menus for over a century, amassing one of the largest culinary
archives in the world. To open up the collection online, we've enlisted the public's help in transcribing the
actual contents of the menus: dishes, prices and other information of great value to researchers that, due to
handwritten lettering, idiosyncratic typography and layouts, has been difficult to extract mechanically. The
resulting database provides a powerful tool for researching the tastes, appetites and social fabric of the past.
Thousands have participated in what is already one of the most successful documented library crowdsourcing
projects, and the growing data set is now available via NYPL's first public API. A collaboration with NYPL's Rare
Book Division, funded generously by the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the Institute for Library and
Museum Services.
Winner of
2011 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association.
Follow @nypl_menus »
Stereogranimator
Inspired by a library user's art project, the Stereogranimator is a browser-based tool
for transforming over 40,000 historical stereographs into shareable, screen-friendly 3D formats. 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. The site also features
several thousand stereographs from the Boston Public Library.
Ensemble
Labs is working with the Billy
Rose Theatre Division on a community transcription project around its massive collection of New York
City theatrical playbills. The aim is to produce a linked data set of historical performances (and their casts of
creators and characters) that can be connected to theater history projects around the globe. Labs launched a
prototype of the tool last year and aims to release a more robust version later this year.
Direct Me NYC: 1940
Built with NYPL’s Milstein Division of United States History, Local
History and Genealogy, Direct Me NYC: 1940 is a rapid-response reference tool built in
anticipation of the 2012 release of the 1940 Federal Census records. Weaving a complex research process into a
single web-based workflow, we digitized five New York City phone directories from microfilm and used them as the
starting point for navigating 3.8 million unindexed (at the time) pages of census material at the National
Archives website. Patrons were also invited to share stories
about the people and addresses they searched, building a cultural memory bank directly out of the pages of the
phone book. The site also features a collaboration with the New York Times R&D Lab: a 1940 headline ticker
that leads to digitized newspaper files providing context around the year the Census was taken.
Follow @NYPLMilstein »
Map Warper
Built with the NYPL Map Division, 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. Tile by tile, we're stitching old atlas sheets into historical
layers, that researchers can explore with pan-and-zoom functionality, comparing yesterday's cityscape with
today's. Along with other tools -- such as one for tracing building footprints and transcribing address and
material information found on the maps -- we are laying the groundwork for dynamic geospatial discovery of other
library collections: manuscripts and archives, historical newspapers, photography, A/V, ephemera (e.g. menus)
etc. Join our citizen cartography corps and help build this virtual atlas of New York City (and other parts of the
world). Built with generous support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities.
Follow @NYPLMaps »
Radioactive
A companion website to the exhibition Radioactive: Marie & Pierre
Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, which tells the story of Lauren Redniss, an artist, writer and former Cullman Center fellow, who drew on the
vast collections of The New York Public Library to create a new work of art. NYPL Labs collaborated with a
talented group of students at Parsons the New School for Design who, with Redniss as their guide, created an
imaginative website showcasing new works inspired by the visual and narrative universe of Radioactive.
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. Modern theatrical lighting is a uniquely American art form, which until now has been exceedingly
difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. This collection contains actual plots,
focus charts, cue sheets and much more from four landmark productions digitized from the collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For the
first time, these masterworks can now be studied in theaters, classrooms, libraries and homes far from the
archives that hold them.
Candide 2.0
Launched in conjunction with the Library’s 2009/10 exhibition, Candide at 250: Scandal and Success,
Candide 2.0 was an experiment in public reading and communal annotation. In the spirit of Candide’s famous closing
line “let us cultivate our garden,” we commissioned readers, or “gardeners,” from a wide variety of backgrounds
(professors, novelists, playwrights, translators) to plant seeds of commentary in assigned chapters, preparing the
ground for a fertile public conversation. The experiment ran for two months and amassed over 200 comments,
suggesting what might be possible were the library to host more robust social editions, for scholarly, classroom
or creative communities.
THE TEAM
Ben Vershbow, Director - @subsublibrary
Josh Hadro, Deputy Director - @hadro
Matthew Miller, Head of Semantic Applications & Data Research - @thisismmiller
Shana Kimball, Manager, Public Programs & Outreach - @shanakimball
Shawn Averkamp, Manager, Metadata Services - @saverkamp
Eric Shows, Manager, Digitization Services
Tom Lisanti, Manager, Permissions & Reproductions - @tomlis
Willa Armstrong, Digital Projects Librarian - @willaarms
Product and R&D Group
Bert Spaan - @bertspaan
Brian Foo - @beefoo
Leonard Richardson - @leonardr
Mauricio Giraldo - @mgiraldo
Paul Beaudoin - @nonword
Labs doodle by Michael Lascarides