[Ecommerce] [Fwd: NYT: Public Library Opens a web gallery of images]

[Manon Ress]

New York Times
March 3, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/books/03libr.html

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: NYT: Public Library Opens a web gallery of images
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 20:12:36 -0500
From: Manon Ress <manon.ress@cptech.org>
To: Ecommerce@lists.essential.org

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The Public Library Opens a Web Gallery of Images
By SARAH BOXER

Published: March 3, 2005

Let the browser beware. The New York Public Library's collection of
prints, maps, posters, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sheet-music
covers, dust jackets, menus and cigarette cards is now online
(digitalgallery.nypl.org). If you dive in today without knowing why, you
might not surface for a long, long time. The Public Library's digital
gallery is lovely, dark and deep. Quite eccentric, too.

So far, about 275,000 items are online, and you can browse by subject,
by collection, by name or by keyword. The images first appear in
thumbnail pictures, a dozen to a page. Some include verso views. You can
collect 'em, enlarge 'em, download 'em, print 'em and hang 'em on your
wall at home. All are free, unless, of course, you plan to make money on
them yourself. (Permission is required.)

Despite the Web site's great richness, sleek looks and fast response to
a mouse click, it does feel a bit musty. The digital gallery is modeled
on an old-fashioned card catalog, with all the attendant creaks. Doing a
search is like going into a library and opening file drawers.

For instance, you can't get a list of all the photographers or the
printmakers or the artists - only an alphabetical list of every proper
name in the digital library. If you type in "photograph*" (the most
general search term), you will get more than 11,000 items, organized who
knows how. To find out who is in it, you have to go through all of the
thumbnail images. If you limit the search by typing in "photograph," you
get about 2,200 items. If you type in "photographer," you get only 200.

One difference between this Web site and a card catalog is that there's
no librarian to help you. That can be both maddening and liberating.

Say you start your exploration with one of the two images that open the
library's Digital Gallery, a detail from a color woodcut from Kitagawa
Utamaro's ukiyo-e prints (pictures of the floating world) depicting the
lives of ordinary Japanese women and courtesans. There are 35 images
from that series, and you can magnify each one enough to see how the
women are doing with their lipstick and mirrors.

What other Japanese images are there? Use the search term "Japanese" and
you will find 210 assorted items, including a 19th-century photograph of
two Japanese girls sleeping, a page showing various kinds of Japanese
lacquers, a print showing Japanese alphabets, sheet music for an 1893
song titled "The Jap," a 1727 map of Japan, a menu for a dinner that was
held aboard the Kobe in 1900, a picture of a fish called the Japanese
grunt, and a cigarette card showing a Japanese plane.

Want to know what cigarette cards are? Look and you'll learn that in the
late 19th and early 20th century, these small picture cards were tucked
into cigarette packets as a promotional device, the cigarette equivalent
of bubblegum cards. Exactly 21,206 of them are online now. What? That's
right. Cigarette cards now represent nearly one-tenth of the whole
digital collection.

Maybe, rather than entering the New York Public Library's digital
gallery through the ukiyo-e, you go by way of the Web site's other
opening image, a 1935 photo of a grouchy-looking man emerging from a
basement barbershop on the Bowery. On that path you will find 343
photographs from Berenice Abbott's great work from the 1930's, "Changing
New York." You can flip through the pictures and read all about Abbott,
her project and how it got to the public library.

That's just the tip of the photographic berg.

The digital gallery has a big collection from the Civil War, including
pictures of the dead taken by Alexander Gardner and pictures of the
wounded kept by the United States Sanitary Commission. It has thousands
of rare photographs of Russia and the Soviet Union, including funny
shots of a day nursery at a Moscow factory, and thousands of color
pictures of every block in Lower Manhattan taken in a single year, 1999,
by one man, Dylan Stone.

The Lewis Wickes Hine photographic collection is online too: 48 pictures
(and in some cases his captions, too) of the construction of the Empire
State Building, 111 photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island, 138
photographs of child laborers, and 132 pictures of libraries and readers.

Speaking of libraries, the New York Public Library's digital gallery has
5,027 assorted images of them, including a photograph of a library in
Sebastopol taken during the Crimean War, architectural drawings for a
New York library and a few undated typed messages that read like
lascivious fortune cookies: "Grown-ups enjoy reading, also." "Come into
the booth and ask questions about your libraries."



(Page 2 of 2)

The fetishism of collecting certainly comes through when you browse the
library's digital galleries. There are pages upon pages of shoes and
slippers, floor plans and elevations, actors and performances. One
gorgeous page is a color-combination chart for layering clothes. Another
page shows a lock of hair from the friendship book of Anne Wagner, a
friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Fifteen pictures are from a
1912 book titled "The Fetish Folk of West Africa."

This grand, eccentric collection has uncountable strengths, but the late
20th century is not among them. That's the way it has to be for a
library that is completely accessible to everyone on earth. Only items
that date before 1923 are in the public domain, free for the plucking.
That's why there is no image from 2003. And for the year 2004, you will
find only one entry, made in error. It's a clothing ad from a page of a
1904 Scribner's Magazine.

For the weary wanderer, the library has included a special heading on
the opening page of its Web site, "Explore," divided into seven neat
subject areas. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's good to
start here.

But if you feel like burrowing, you might try searching inside the
individual collections and libraries within the New York Public Library.
Rummage through the rare books division (pausing a moment to reflect how
incredible it is to be rummaging in a rare books library) and you will
find George Catlin's "North American Indian Portfolio," J.-J.
Grandville's "Les Fleurs Anim=E9es," William Blake's illuminated book
"Milton" and Alvin Langdon Coburn's book of portrait photographs, "Men
of Mark." Warning: some of the collections follow their own filing systems.

The various parts of the digital library have not been fully integrated,
so the site has a quirky feel. It's often hard to tell, until you
accidentally hit a vein, where the richest parts of the digital library are=
.

But surprises can be nice, though. Who would have guessed that a search
of images from the year 2000 would yield only photos of theater
marquees? And that a search for the year 1900 would lead to nearly 1,700
menus from the Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection? That's a
whole lot of shad and kidney stew.

--
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC PO Box 19367,
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+44(0)207 354 0607






--
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC PO Box 19367,
Washington, DC 20036, USA Tel.:  +1.202.387.8030, fax: +1.202.234.5176

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva, 1 Route des  Morillons, CP
2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland. Tel: +41 22 791 6727

Consumer Project on Technology in London, 24 Highbury Crescent, London,
N5 1RX, UK. Tel:+44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252. Mob:+44(0)790 386 4642. Fax:
+44(0)207 354 0607