NYPL Labs

 

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 at NYPLTogether 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.

 

 

 

 

 

Mosaic of Public Domain ImagesWe ♥ 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

"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.

Apply now for a Triple Canopy Commission at NYPL Labs!

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.

NYPL Space/Time

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
web map Generative eBook Covers NYPL Labs Net Artist Residency
The Networked Catalog Google Street View Layers Old Maps in Minecraft
The Networked Catalog Google Street View History Brush Historical Maps in Minecraft

PROJECTS

Photographers' Identities Catalog (PIC)

Photographers' Identities Catalog

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.

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Emigrant City

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.

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BILLI

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.

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Building Inspector

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.

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NYPL Digital Collections

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.

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NYPL Archives & Manuscripts

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. 

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Community Oral History Project

NYPL 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.

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What's on the Menu?

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.

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Follow @nypl_menus »

 

Stereogranimator 

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.

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Ensemble 

 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.

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Direct Me NYC: 1940 

 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.

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Follow @NYPLMilstein »

 

Map Warper

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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