Digitizing for impact - from pixels to scholarship

To further increase the discoverability, access, and use of the New York Public Library’s collections, digitization offers our patrons manifold possibilities for research and a deep dive into the Library’s encyclopedic holdings. Over the past decade, we have established clear workflows for digitizing research collections at the New York Public Library and are dedicated to building partnerships to explore how transforming collections into a digital form can multiply research impact.

In this presentation, we’ll take a closer look at the digitization life cycle of a single collection, from curatorial request to online publishing and structured data extraction. Along the way, we’ll look at the opportunities for scholarship that arise when research materials have been digitized and become available online through our digital portal. 

We’ll discuss recent successes that aid genealogical research and our understanding of the urban landscape and the latent potential in some recently digitized collections and corresponding research implications. We’ll also discuss how feedback from researchers about the rising baseline expectations around collections as data has begun to influence how we think about digitization strategy and how we think about partnering with the scholarly community.