The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections has more than 850k artifacts that range from books to videos, to maps, to manuscripts, to photographs, and more.
The Basics
Search, Browse, Filter
On the landing page, users can conduct a basic search or browse by item, collection, or library division. In the search bar, users may select the Search only public domain materials check box to receive a list of search results exclusively in the public domain.
Once on the search results page, users are then able to apply filters so that they can more easily find what they’re looking for: topic, name, collection, place, genre, publisher, division, and type.
The site even provides a blog post with pointers to get started searching the NYPL’s Digital Collections.
Download
Users are able to download an artifact easily by clicking the desired artifact on the Search Results page and selecting a file size in the DOWNLOAD OPTIONS section on the digital artifact’s digital record page.
Exportable image?
No, just the download function. However, there is an option to order a reproduction of the artifact via a high-resolution TIFF file.
Facsimile image?
Yes
Full text searchable?
Yes
Digitized from microfilm?
Yes, some of the artifacts have been digitized from microfilm. Those that have been digitized from microfilm are identified as such in the PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION section on the digital record page.
Citing
Each digitized artifact’s record has a citation section, so a user simply clicks the “Cite This Item” button and is taken to a series of citations based on the style guide – APA, MLA, Chicago, and Wikipedia.
The Digital Record
Date Range
After conducting a few searches, it looks like the oldest artifact is a Jewish book from 713 A.D. that was reprinted in mid-twentieth century, and the newest artifact is a video recording of an academic academic lecture in 2016.
Digitization Types
Each digitized record had a section labeled TYPE with one of the following categories:
- Still images
- Text
- Cartographic
- Moving image
- Sound recording
- Notated music
- Three-dimensional object
- Sound recording-musical
- Sound recording-nonmusical
- Software, multimedia
The categories are hyperlinks in the digital record, so once the user clicks them, they’re taken to a filtered search results page. For instance, if the user clicks the “Moving image” hyperlink in the TYPE section, then they are taken to a Search Results page that displays only artifacts categorized as moving images.
Linked projects
A lot of the artifact records include links to other digital projects, like the NYPL Catalog, NYPL Archives Portal, and Digital Public Library of America. In doing so, the NYPL Digital Collections provides the resources for its users to move seamlessly from one collection to another, expanding their sources and deepening their analyses.
They’ve also extracted data from historical sources and added these links to artifact records, when and where applicable. For example, the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Pailthorpe, Frederick W. Two original sketches are also a part of Digital Public Library of America. Other examples include Map Warper, Building Inspector, Stereogranimator, and What’s on the Menu.
Access
The link to learn more about the NYPL’s accessibility process is available here.
Publishers
Because this is a digital library collection, there are more than 50 pages of publishers who have contributed artifacts; however, here is a link to the NYPL’s Digital Collections About page.
Original catalog, sources, and their locations
Because this is a collection of artifacts from hundreds of different publishers, there is no one original source catalog. The digitized artifacts span a range of eras across the world, quite literally.
But each digitized record has the original catalog and their locations provided. For instance, this newspaper clipping from 1951 originated in New York and was published by W.G. Bryan and Associates. The publisher link takes the user to the Search Results page that’s filtered by artifacts published by W.G. Bryan and Associates.
The Technical
Platforms
- Fedora Commons – Data repository
- Ruby on Rails – Bibliographic, technical, and rights metadata
- JavaScript
Available Metadata
- The New York Public Library Digital Collections API makes available all of the metadata in XML and JSON.
- GitHub makes available bulk metadata for download in CSV and JSON.
