NYPL Labs

ABOUT

NYPL Labs is an experimental unit at the Library developing ideas and tools for digital research. A collaboration among curators, designers and technologists, NYPL Labs is dedicated to rethinking what a public research library can be and do in the new information commons. We develop everything from proof-of-concept pilots to fully realized web applications and digital archives, as well as hosting a variety of staff workshops and public talks.

Building on the Library's public mission, Labs also seeks to foster collaboration with NYPL users through crowdsourcing and participatory initiatives, and shares tools and data with the wider library and digital humanities communities.

Upcoming Events:

• February 23 - Linked Open Data Workshop - hosted in collaboration with METRO and NYU

Follow us on Twitter: @nypl_labs »
Get in touch: labs@nypl.org »

(proper Labs website coming soon!)

ACTIVE PROJECTS

Stereogranimator 

Inspired by a library patron's art project, the Stereogranimator is Labs' latest user collaboration app, inviting the public to transform over 40,000 historical stereographs into web-friendly 3D formats shareable to all. For the better part of a century, stereoscopic views were the cutting edge of immersive 3D entertainment, and for over a decade the Library has been sharing its vast collection on the web as flat, two-dimensional artifacts. Now, 19th century photography collides with early internet folk art as users remix vintage stereos into animated GIFs, bringing the past tantalizingly in reach with an eerie wiggle effect. 3D afficionados can also create red-blue anaglyphs, which, with the right glasses, recreate the incredible depth effect of these images. After an overwhelming response to the initial launch, the Labs team is already hard at work on improving the site.

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Follow @nypl_stereo »

What's on the Menu? 

The Library has been collecting restaurant menus for over a century, amassing one of the largest culinary archives in the world. Approximately one quarter of the 40,000-item collection (housed in the Rare Book Division) has been digitized, but now we're enlisting the public's help in transcribing the actual contents of the menus: dishes, prices and other information of great value to researchers that, due to handwritten lettering, idiosyncratic typography and layouts, has been difficult to extract mechanically. The resulting database will become a powerful tool for researching the tastes, appetites and social fabric of the past. Thousands have participated in what is already one of the most successful documented library crowdsourcing projects, continuing a proud volunteer tradition at NYPL. Funded generously by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Library and Museum Services. 

Winner of 2011 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association!

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Follow @nypl_menus »

Map Warper

The NYPL Map Division is working to build an unparalleled resource for researching New York City history. The Map Warper is a tool suite, used by library staff but also open to the public, to align (or "rectify") historical maps to the digital maps of today. Tile by tile, we're stitching old atlas sheets into historical layers, that researchers can explore with pan-and-zoom functionality, comparing yesterday's cityscape with today's. Along with other tools, such as one for tracing building footprints and transcribing address and material information found on the maps, we are laying the groundwork for dynamic geospatial discovery of other library collections: manuscripts and archives, historical newspapers, photography, A/V, ephemera (e.g. menus) etc. Join our citizen cartography corps and help build this virtual atlas of New York City (and other parts of the world). Built with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Recently honored as a 'Cutting-Edge Service' by the American Library Association!

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Follow @NYPLMaps »

Music Theater Online 

Based at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Music Theater Online is a digital archive of texts, images, video, and audio files relating to musical theater. The best printed editions of musical theater texts cannot fully provide the experience of simultaneous expression of verbal, musical, and terpsichorean languages so necessary to understand the art form. Using the multimedia capabilities of the modern web browser and mobile devices, we hope to create a better framework for studying these important works of drama. With generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MTO's work expands this year at NYPL with the serial release of free, multi-format electronic editions of twelve historical musicals.

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The Shelley-Godwin Archive

In its initial planning stages, The Shelley-Godwin Archive will present key works of British Romanticism by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The Archive will draw primarily from the two foremost collections of these materials, those of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at NYPL, which together hold an estimated 90 percent of all known relevant manuscripts worldwide. With the Archive’s creation, manuscripts and early editions of these writers will be made freely available to the public through an innovative framework based upon the Shakespeare Quartos Archive. First among these is the manuscript of Mary Shelley's iconic novel of 1818, Frankenstein; and second will be the working notebooks of P.B. Shelley, which are scattered amongst five partner institutions from California to England. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will create the project’s infrastructure, with the assistance of NYPL Labs. The Shelley-Godwin Archive is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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RECENT EXPERIMENTS/PROTOTYPES

Radioactive

A companion website to the exhibition Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, which tells the story of Lauren Redniss, an artist, writer and former Cullman Center fellow, who drew on the vast collections of The New York Public Library to create a new work of art. NYPL Labs collaborated with a talented group of students at Parsons the New School for Design who, with Redniss as their guide, created an innovative website showcasing a dazzling array of new works inspired by the visual and narrative universe of Radioactive.

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Theatrical Lighting Database

In partnership with the Lighting Archive and legendary designer Beverly Emmons, the Theatrical Lighting Database is a proof-of-concept version of what is aimed at being an extensive digital archive of original lighting documents. Modern theatrical lighting is a uniquely American art form, which until now has been exceedingly difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. This collection contains actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets and much more from four landmark productions digitized from the collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For the first time, these masterworks can now be studied in theaters, classrooms, libraries and homes far from the archives that hold them.

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Candide 2.0

Launched in conjunction with the Library’s 2009/10 exhibition, Candide at 250: Scandal and Success, Candide 2.0 was an experiment in public reading and communal annotation. In the spirit of Candide’s famous closing line “let us cultivate our garden,” we commissioned readers, or “gardeners,” from a wide variety of backgrounds (professors, novelists, playwrights, translators) to plant seeds of commentary in assigned chapters, preparing the ground for a fertile public conversation. The experiment ran for two months and amassed over 200 comments, suggesting what might be possible were the library to host more robust social editions, for scholarly, classroom or creative communities.

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THE TEAM 

Labs Development Group
Ben Vershbow (Manager, NYPL Labs)
David Riordan (Product Manager)
Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga (Interaction Designer/Developer)
Zeeshan Lakhani (Applications Developer)

Digital Curators
Liz Denlinger (Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle)
Sylviane Diouf (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
Rebecca Federman (Electronic Resources/Culinary Collections)
Michael Inman (Rare Books)
Matt Knutzen (Map Division)
Maira Liriano (Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History & Genealogy)
Doug Reside (Library for the Performing Arts)
William Stingone (Manuscripts and Archives)

Steering Group
Ann Thornton (Acting Andrew W. Mellon Director of The New York Public Library)
Victoria Steele (Brooke Russell Astor Director of Collections Strategy)
Micah May (Director of Strategy)
Jane Aboyoun (Chief Technology Officer)
Michael Lascarides (Senior Manager of Web Initiatives)
Heidi Singer (Director, Digital and Print Publications)