ISSN ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 65 | October 2003
An Intern in New York
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| New York Public Library, Manhattan, New York, USA |
In the centre of Manhattan on the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street stands the main building of the New York Public Library (NYPL), one of the world’s great libraries. Amongst all its other activities, NYPL is creating 600 000 images from its collections for public use through its website.
Tom Ruthven, who manages the National Library of Australia’s Digitisation Project, was lucky enough to spend three months as an intern at NYPL from April to June this year, mainly with Digital Library Team.
What are the top three questions Tom has been asked since his return?
What was it like at NYPL?
Exciting, interesting and strangely familiar. The Research Libraries arm of the NYPL and the National Library are remarkably similar. Both seek to serve a diverse community of researchers, and house, preserve and continue to build major research collections.
The NYPL Research Libraries are comprised of four centres, the Humanities and Social Sciences in the iconic building on 5th Avenue; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in the Lincoln Center sited between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Juilliard School of Music; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem; and the Science, Industry & Business Library opposite the Empire State Building on 34th Street.
Walk around any of these places and you see remarkable material, staff committed to serving today’s public, tomorrow’s public and the public in 100 years. The busy reading rooms are full of people finding the information they need.
Unlike the National Library, NYPL also operates a public library network like those run by local government in Australia, with 85 branch libraries spread across Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island.
Both libraries see the Internet as a key way to bring their services and collections to the user, and have made significant commitments to digitising material in their collections in order to provide free public access over the Internet to at least some of the material they hold.
How is NYPL creating 600 000 images?
NYPL is using very similar image and metadata standards to those used in Australia by libraries, museums, galleries and archives. Workflows to create so many images so quickly are very streamlined.
Images are created using a mixture of outsourced and internal digitisation teams. NYPL uses existing data to create the descriptive metadata, including data from the main catalogue, local databases used to manage specific collections of material, and descriptive listings. And, like the National Library, NYPL has had to develop software to manage the processing of the images and data, the capturing of much of the technical metadata, and the storage and delivery of the images to users.
What was it like living in New York?
Did you get to the theatre, the music, the dance, Central Park, and the museums, and what is the shopping like? And the answers to these questions are yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and great!
Tom’s internship was made possible with the assistance of a fund established at the NYPL by a donor.
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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: mbrooks@nla.gov.au