NYPL offers high-res options
The Legal Genealogist is heading off to Salt Lake City later today, in advance of next week’s Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), but can’t leave without taking a quick moment to highlight a brand-new announcement by the New York Public Library.
It has just enhanced its NYPL Digital Collections offerings of public domain materials by offering them as high-resolution downloads we can all use without any copyright concerns. As the announcement said: “No permission required, no hoops to jump through: just go forth and reuse!”1
More than 180,000 digitized items are now free of administrative and processing fees, free of permission requests, free of any hassles at all. And, the announcement tells us, “Online users of the NYPL Digital Collections website will find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content…”2
That free content includes some of the best of the Library’s holdings, including papers and correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; manuscripts from Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau; more than 40,000 stereoscopes from all parts of the United States; and more than 20,000 maps and atlases from around the world.
The NYPL announcement explains that the changes are “intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds. All subsequently digitized public domain collections will be made available in the same way, joining a growing repository of open materials.”3
To show off the ways these public domain materials can be used, the library has some really neat features and demonstration projects:
• “a visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale;”
• “a ‘mansion builder’ game, exploring floor plans of grand turn-of-the-century New York apartments;”
• “a then-and-now comparison of New York’s Fifth Avenue, juxtaposing 1911 wide angle photographs with Google Street View; and”
• “a ‘trip planner’ using locations extracted from mid-20th century motor guides that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, and other destinations where Black travelers would be welcome.”
For more information on the public domain materials and projects at the NYPL, check out the Library’s public domain page, nypl.org/publicdomain.
SOURCES
- Shana Kimball, “Free for All: NYPL Enhances Public Domain Collections For Sharing and Reuse,” NYPL Blogs, posted 5 Jan 2016 (http://www.nypl.org/blog/ : accessed 6 Jan 2016). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
THANKS, Judy! As editor of the Kentucky Genealogical Society’s e-quarterly, Bluegrass Roots, I am constantly wishing I had easy access to free-use images. I have a feeling the NYPL site is going to become my best friend.
The NYPL is wonderful — arguably the finest library in the USA and one of the top five in the entire world. The iconic building on Fifth Avenue is just a fraction of the story. Outstanding materials are squirreled away throughout all five boroughs of the city in branch and specialized libraries, such as the NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
http://www.nypl.org/research
No disagreement on the merits of the NYPL!
To clarify a posting about the collections in all 5 boroughs, NYPL only manages the libraries in the boroughs of Staten Island, Manattan and the Bronx. The Brooklyn and Queensborough library systems manage the library collections in their respective boroughs.
To clarify, the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens manage the libraries in their respective boroughs