Happy Monday as we kick off a new week with the New York Public Library Digital Letters Collections.
On this day in 1911, May 23, “In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library, the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States, is dedicated in New York City.” Fast forward and we are looking today at the New York Public Library Digital Letters Collections.
Later this week the World Stamp Show-NY 2016 will take place with their once-a-decade event scheduled for May 28-June 04 which I will be including in my blog posts.
New York Public Library Digital Letters
Their search by keywords is easy to navigate and my search on “correspondence letters” provided all kinds of collections of letters including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, James Madison, George Washington, and many more. It is definitely worth checking out!
From their About page –
“Digital Collections contains 679,516 items and counting. While that’s a small fraction of the New York Public Library’s overall holdings, the aim of Digital Collections is to provide context for the materials we have digitized and to inspire people to use and reuse the media and data on offer here to advance knowledge and create new works.”
This brief video on what is involved to digitize is fascinating and they described it as creating “digital surrogates”.
The New York Public Library has its own YouTube channel and I especially liked this 5 minute overview.
Thank you for joining me today for New York Public Library Digital Letters. I’m closing out today’s blog post with this quote:
“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
-Ray Bradbury
Anchors Aweigh,
Helen
Attribution & Thank you to the following who are referenced today New York Public Library Digital Letters
Image above of “the lion statues outside the Main Branch building of the New York Public Library are among the most famous landmarks in New York City.” Image by Ken Thomas – KenThomas.us (personal website of photographer), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3684502
This Day In History: May 23 1911 New York Public Library dedicated @HISTORY
Search Engine demo video – The New York Public Library; and excerpt About Digital Collections – The New York Public Library Digital Collections
YouTube Rare Material Digitization with the New York Public Library posted by Digital Transitions – Phase One Dealer published on Oct 6, 2014 “Learn how the New York Public Library (NYPL) uses Digital Transitions products to catalog their rare book collection to make it available freely to world.”
YouTube Inside The New York Public Library: The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building posted by The New York Public Library published on Sep 30, 2014 NYPL.org @nypl
Image upper left of US Postal Service “non-denominated New York Public Library Lion pre-sorted standard (ten-cent value) stamp on November 9, 2000 in New York, New York.” @PostalMuseum.
More About that stamp: The New York Public Library on Stamps: “In 2000 the United States Postal Service (USPS) issued a stamp for pre-sorted standard mail based on one of the lions in front of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Because the USPS has a policy against honoring individual local institutions, the stamp was to be issued with out any reference to the New York Public Library. However, the NYPL required that the inscription “The New York Public Library” be added to the stamp because the lion is trademarked by NYPL. …”
