NYPL Digital Gallery Launches
March 3rd, 2005Reason number four for a year of silence: the NYPL Digital Gallery. Under the direction of Barbara Taranto, we have been working like mad to digitize 500,000 images from the collections of The New York Public Library, create metadata for each item, and build a Digital Asset Management System and publishing system. The first 275,000 images are now live. The remaining images will be published at regular intervals over the coming months, so it will pay to visit the site again and again.
A fine review by Sarah Boxer in The New York Times and our press release describe the intellectual piece. I’ll not write about what they cover so well, but I will share a few of my favorite searches: Manet, library, and Yiddish.
What you will not find covered in the literature for a spell is how we did it, but I’ll be speaking about the process at SXSW in a few days.
An FYI for geeks: the Digital Asset Management System is a homegrown labor of love with an Oracle back-end and ColdFusion web-based front-end. The publishing system is based on an extract from Oracle that is delivered via XML. This allowed us to have a heavily normalized repository database and a rather flat and fast public delivery. More on the use of XML later.