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Just about a month ago, I spent a week interning at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery (DG), an online visual catalog with more than 520,000 images available to search, download, or even turn into coffee mugs; if that’s the sort of thing that fits your fancy.  I’ve been a fan of the Digital Gallery for some time and did a comparative analysis of it along with other prominent online photographic collections for my Introduction to Archives course last Fall.  What the DG has that other institutions haven’t been able to achieve is a better user interface and search experience. While not without room for improvement, the DG does do a good job at allowing people to browse instead of having to be expert searchers for their particular area of interest. In addition, the curators have assembled collections of related materials to give visitors a broader introduction to a subject, such as Africana & Black History. The collection they have assembled for this subject provides a wide spectrum of examples relating to cultural and social issues, illustrations and photographs, awards, newspaper clippings, and more. It is a nice way to get introduced to a subject or discover new associations or research avenues that you may not have previously considered.

What really sets the Digital Gallery apart is their process for putting content on the website. Instead of beginning with the scanning, or imaging, process, the staff first enters the meta data into the database and then associates the images with the related records. It’s a different discipline than what is practiced by many organizations that still believe having the graphic representation online is the most important component to an online visual collection. However, considering that we are still in an era of text-based search, the meta data is what provides the real informational value to the collections by creating a richer and more dynamic access point. Without the meta data, many of the less prominent or obscure collections would have little-to-no visibility. With the inclusion of searchable and relational meta data, these collections are more easily retrieved and lend themselves to discovery and browsing by a larger audience.

There is plenty more items of interest from my short internship, but I’ll leave it to another day and another post. In the meantime, below is a image by Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) that is available on the Digital Gallery website along with many more works by Hine and other notable photographers.

Source: NYPL Digital Gallery (3/26/07)