Digital Research Past Projects

Launched: 2017

The NYC Space/Time Directory makes urban history accessible through resources including a searchable atlas of New York past, an historical location directory and geocoder, a set of APIs and data sets, and a discovery tool linking historical and geographic context.

Launched: 2016 

The New York Public Library's Community Oral History Project was an initiative taking place at NYPL branches that aimed to document, preserve, and celebrate the rich history of the city's unique communities by collecting the stories of people who have experienced it firsthand.

Launched: 2015

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.

Launched: 2015

Emigrant City invited the public to help transcribe 19th and early 20th century real estate records from the Emigrant Savings Bank. These documents reveal the lives and dreams of immigrants who helped create modern New York, and offer a rich data set for use by genealogists, historians, descendants of immigrants, and New Yorkers.

Launched: 2013

Building Inspector was a mobile-friendly web app for improving information extracted from New York City insurance atlases, based on a computer vision process that identifies building shapes and other data from georectified atlas sheets.

Launched: 2012

The Map Warper is a free online tool that enabled you to align digital images of historical maps with their present-day locations through georectification (aka "warping") of maps.

Launched: 2012

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.

Launched: 2012

Direct Me NYC: 1940 was 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.

Launched: 2011

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 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellow, who drew on the vast collections of The New York Public Library to create a new work of art. 

Launched: 2011 

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, we enlisted the public's help in transcribing the actual contents of the menus: dishes, prices and other information that has been difficult to extract mechanically.

Launched: 2011

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.

Launched: 2011

A community transcription project around the Billy Rose Theatre Division’s massive collection of New York City theatrical playbills. This produced 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.