The NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.Collection Principles. The NYPL Digital Gallery is the New York Public Library’s image database, developed to provide free and open online access to thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of the Library in fulfillment of its mission to select, collect, preserve and make accessible "the accumulated wisdom of the world, without distinction as to income, religion, nationality, or other human condition." Spanning a wide range of visual media, NYPL Digital Gallery offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more, in materials identified and nominated by the curators of the Research Libraries that meet one or more of the following criteria: materials already in high demand by the public; unique or very rare treasures too vulnerable for routine availability; unwieldy or brittle artifacts that are difficult to serve; key holdings in particular collection strengths identified with the Library; or little-known but important items from the collections deemed worthy of discovery.
Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of the Research Libraries, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. The wide ranging content is arranged and accessible on the site through links grouped in several categories: arts & literature; cities & buildings; culture & society; history & geography; industry & technology; nature & science; and printing & graphics. Each of these segments presents a grid of thumbnail images on a page, with their titles and Digital IDs. Two additional sizes of digital image are available for each item - a detail and enlargement. Clicking on a smaller image will lead to the next larger one.
The Culture & Society segment includes costumes, country life, customs, dress, family life, fashion, social history, sports, and traditions. Under the section “Dress and Fashion: Design and Manufacture,” there is both a collection history and background and a reference to other Library Division resources. The Collection Contents for the Dress and Fashion site link to specific images in defined contents. The image may be enlarged on a click, is available in printer-ready format and may be selected for purchase as a print or gift. For example, under Ladies Dress Shoes of the Nineteenth Century, thumbnail images expand to detailed metadata of creation, caption, date, location in the particular Library division, medium and various item numbers for the digital and image ID in the Library system.
Image: Brocade shoe; red and white satin shoe; shoe belonging to Rosa Anderson, a fair maid of Perth, whose elopement created a great sensation in bygone days in the town, to whose Council her husband belonged. Digital ID: 105978.Object Characteristics. As specified under “About NYPL Gallery,” for each item in the Digital Gallery, a high-resolution, 300- to 1200-dpi digital image file has been created using a flatbed scanner or a digital camera. Each file is named at the time of capture with a unique number tying it to its respective descriptive record. Destined for archival storage, these original digital ‘captures’ are not altered, enhanced or otherwise corrected, creating a record of an item’s authentic appearance and condition; nor are the ‘archival’ files cropped, in order to retain accompanying written or printed information. Simultaneously, three low-resolution, 72-dpi ‘derivative’ files are created for delivery on the web, at 150 pixels (thumbnail or index image), 300 pixels (detail view) and 760 pixels (enlargement), respectively, on the long side. Further technical metadata is provided in the “About” section as well as details regarding licensing of images.
Metadata. The Digital Gallery Home page provides very good administrative metadata in links to searching and browsing how-tos, a user’s guide, FAQs, credits (donors support), how to purchase prints online, and conditions of use. It also provides a preview of a re-work of the Gallery site and requests input from users. In a note on the home page, there is a warning and further instruction about content, as well as a reference to preservation metadata: “Content on this site is drawn from a broad range of original historical resources, including materials that may contain offensive language or stereotypes. Such materials should be viewed in the context of the time and place in which they were created. All historical media are presented as specific, original artifacts, without further enhancement to their appearance or quality, as a record of the era in which they were produced.”
As indicated on the “About” section referenced above, the NYPL Digital Gallery runs on an open, extensible architecture designed by the Digital Library Program and managed in conjunction with the Library’s Information Technology Group. Image files are stored on a 57-terabyte network of servers (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes, or 1 trillion bytes). Together, the image files and the data hierarchy and structure are managed through an Oracle database. A systematic XML extract of this data is indexed with the Java open-source search engine Lucene, which provides the public search matrix. ColdFusion software provides the application programming interface that integrates metadata and images for web delivery, via a website interface developed with consultant support by the Digital Library Program.
Intended Audience. Each segment and each group of images under each would appear have its own intended audiences, primarily students and historians of the particular subject matter. For example, students and historians of 19th and early 20th century European and U.S. dress and fashion would be interested in the Dress and Fashion group under the Culture & Society segment given the several rare and unusual published resources such as the historical surveys as well as manufacturers' booklets and sample swatch catalogs containing real fabric swatches along with sketches showing how the new prints and weaves could be fashioned into seasonably stylish garments.
No comments:
Post a Comment