Digitization@METRO

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum recently launched a digital collection titled The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History, which was funded in part with a METRO Digitization Grant in 2006.

Institution: Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives 
Collection: The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History
Description: The Brooklyn Bridge, an instantly identifiable symbol of both Brooklyn and New York City, has long served as an inspiration for people from all walks of life. Artists, artisans, and photographers, both professionals and amateurs, have documented and interpreted the structure and the city around it. This digital collection comprises works of art from the Brooklyn Museum's collections and unique visual materials from the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives. Interpretive essays from the 1983 Brooklyn Museum exhibition catalogue The Great East River Bridge, 1883–1983 are also presented.

Make sure to also check out the Community link, which allows users to submit their own pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge to the Brooklyn Museum website via Flickr.

Great job by Deborah Wythe and everyone at Brooklyn Museum who worked on the project.

Image: Samuel Halpert (American, 1884–1930). View of Brooklyn Bridge, n.d. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Benjamin Halpert, 54.15

BPL Collection: Sheet Music

Brooklyn Public Library recently launched their latest digital collection titled Illustrated Covers from the Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection, which was funded in part with a METRO Digitization Grant in 2006.

Institution: Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)
Collection: Illustrated Covers from the Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection
Description: The Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection consists of 102 pieces of sheet music from 1869 to 1987, primarily for voice and piano, all celebrating or emanating from the borough of Brooklyn. Contents include marches written in honor of a local person or business, pieces celebrating the whole or a part of the borough, songs from shows and movies set in or about Brooklyn, and pieces from Brooklyn's early 20th-century Yiddish-language theater.

Once again BPL leveraged their other digital collections by linking these sheet music covers to related content from both their Fulton Street Trade Cards Collection and Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. Here's a good example.

Nice job by Susan Benz and everyone at Brooklyn Public Library who worked on the project.

Frick Art Reference Library

METRO and a group of eleven members paid a site visit to the Frick Art Reference Library's Digital Lab on November 16, 2006. Don Swanson and his staff talked about their work, demonstrated equipment, answered questions, and left me and others quite impressed with their operation.

The Frick is currently working with ARTstor to digitize thousands of glass plate negatives and interpositives. The glass plate negatives are scanned in-house using a Better Light scanning back and interpositives are sent to an outside vendor for conversion.

The Frick captures materials at 900 dpi, 16 bit grayscale, which results in a file size of around 120 MB.

The scans are then saved to (1) local hard drive (2) cds (3) network server (offsite) and (4) tape (offsite). In addition, the original glass plate negatives are saved in acid free folders and put in cold storage. Four backup copies of the digital image, using four storage formats, saved in three different physical locations, and retention of the original. That's pretty darn good.

These images are available via ARTstor.

In addition to giving us a tour of the digital lab, Don showed us the conservation department where the staff was meticulously piecing together the bindings of old books, the spotless stacks (not even a speck of dust), and the beautiful reading room.

Thanks to Don, everyone at the Frick, and all who attended.

Image: Helen Clay Frick (and dog) c. 1918, scanned from a spoiling nitrate negative

8.6 Gigapixels - Wow!

An Italian company, HAL9000, claims to have created the world's largest digital image measuring 8.6 gigapixels.

The image is of a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari known as the Vito di Cristo in 1513 which depicts the life of Jesus Christ in 21 pictures. The original fresco measured over 750 square feet.

While the technological achievement is incredible, I am left completely humbled by the attention to detail paid by the artist. Everywhere you zoom, you see something that amazes.

LACUNY Digital Projects Workshop

I would like to thank the folks at LACUNY (Library Association of the City University of New York) for inviting me to a program titled Digital Projects Within CUNY Libraries, Archives, And Special Collections. The program was presented by the LACUNY Archives & Special Collections Roundtable and held at Baruch College on November 10, 2006.

The program included a keynote presentation titled Digitization 101: The Essentials by Claudia Perry, a professor at Queens College GSLIS. I was glad to hear Claudia emphasize the importance of documenting your project - an area that often gets overlooked. I'm a big fan of the blog as a tool for documenting digital projects. I also liked this nugget of advice she gave to those planning their first digitization project - which is to keep things simple.

It was also nice to hear the presentations by METRO Digitization Grant recipients Ellen Belcher and Ellen Sexton of John Jay College who are hard at work on their Crime in New York 1800-1950 project and Janet Munch of Lehman College who showed off their Bronx Business for Everybody collection.

One thing I noticed during the spirited Q&A and discussion was that confusion abounds when it comes to copyright issues and so I hope that the LACUNY community will register for METRO's upcoming symposium Copyright: The Only Certainty is Uncertainty on February 15, 2007.

NYPL: Early Real Estate Insurance Maps of New York

When most people see a map like this the first thing that comes to mind for them is that it's a Sanborn, which has become synonomous with this style of fire insurance map. But in this case they would be wrong because this is a Perris map created by William Perris, "an English-trained civil engineer and surveyor who originated the format."

Thanks to a digitization grant from METRO in 2005, the New York Public Library was able to digitize over two hundred of these Early Real Estate Insurance Maps of New York and Brooklyn from the 1850s-1860s.

This particular map is of interest to me because it's the exact block (circa 1860) where METRO resides today. And just for fun here's what it looks like in the Google.

Over at the NYPL Digital Gallery, you can use their pan & zoom functionality to see the names of the buildings and the types of businesses that existed back then. Hmm, let's see. There's the New York Society Library which dates back to 1754 over on 13th and University, and over yonder is my favorite Livery Stable on 14th and 4th, and you gotta love the Druggist next to the Coal Yards on 11th and Broadway. And wait a second what do I see over on 12th and 4th? A Starbucks!

Great job by Barbara Taranto, Janet Murray, Matt Knutzen, and everyone else at NYPL who worked on the project.

BPL: Fulton Street Trade Cards

Need an idea for a Halloween costume? Then how about dressing up as a witch on a flying owl? This image comes from the Brooklyn Public Library: Fulton Street Trade Card Collection which was a project funded by a METRO digitization grant in 2005.

Institution: Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)
Collection: Fulton Street Trade Card Collection
Description: The Fulton Street Trade Card Collection consists of 245 late 19th and early 20th century illustrated trade cards, all emanating from businesses in Brooklyn's historic commercial thoroughfare. The cards combine humor, bright and elegant graphic design and typography to promote a wide variety of wares and services. The Fulton Street trade cards are among the many collections held by the Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library's local history division, and the world's largest public archive for the study of Brooklyn's social and cultural history.

The cards are both beautiful and interesting and I particularly like the way BPL linked the trade cards to related content from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. View all the Fulton Street Cards on BPL's website or on METRO's CONTENTdm site.

Great job by Susan Benz and everyone at Brooklyn Public Library who worked on the project.

Brooklyn College: Democratic Party Scrapbooks

With election day soon approaching, I thought it would be timely to highlight this wonderful collection of Democratic Party campaign materials digitized by the Brooklyn College Library who received a grant from METRO in 2005.

Institution: Brooklyn College Library
Collection: Brooklyn Democratic Party Scrapbooks
Description: A selection of materials dated between (1898-1927) from the the George A. Wingate, John B. Johnston, and Patrick Quinn Scrapbooks contained in the Records of the Brooklyn Democratic Party at the Brooklyn College Library, which document the development of the powerful Democratic political machine in Brooklyn.

The image is of a sample Democratic ballot from November 4, 1918 and includes Ten Reason Why You Should Vote for Alfred E. Smith for Governor including:

Reason Number 2: He secured the Fifty-Four Hour Law making a shorter work day for women in factories and stores.

Reason Number 9: He will vigorously suppress all profiteering in the necessities of life.

Click here to read the rest. And, in case you were wondering, he won.

Great job by Marianne LaBatto, Edythe Rosenblatt, and everyone at Brooklyn College who worked on the project.

Lehman College: Bronx Business for Everybody

Since 2005, METRO has provided small grants to help our members digitize their special collections. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to feature these collections in this space.

Institution: Lehman College Library
Collection: Bronx Business for Everybody
Description: The Bronx Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1894 for the purpose of promoting Bronx commercial, industrial, civic and cultural interests. This digital collection includes photographs of Bronx buildings, streets, businesses, recreational sites, organizations, and educational sites as well as selections of minutes, newspaper and magazine articles drawn from the Bronx Chamber of Commerce Collection focusing on the years from the 1920s to the 1950s.

While the images are wonderful, what I like most about this collection is that the website provides context for the digital images. On the website you can find books, web resources, and activities for K-12.

Great job by Lehman College's Janet Munch and Yi Sheng.

Image: 149th St., Melrose Ave. & Third Ave.

European Archive

Check out the recently launched European Archive whose Googlesque goal is to work "towards universal access to all knowledge."

The European Archive will focus on the digitization of special collections (books, music, images, and moving images) and has partnered with the Internet Archive to create a European based web archive.

Unfortunately, some of the content won't be be available to those of us outside of Europe, due to, you guessed it, copyright issues.