Blog Posts by Subject: Image Collections

How and why does red make us want to buy?

As part of the Early American Manuscripts Project, the Library has just digitized and made available online the Joseph Hawley papers. Hawley was a lawyer, legislator, and militia officer from Northampton, Massachusetts.

NYPL has digitized hundreds of thousands of objects and artifacts. How can we better integrate these into exhibitions and other experiences in physical spaces? On July 15 – 17, 2015, we had the fantastic opportunity to ask that question of participants in the first ever ITP Innovation Lab.

What is this curious artifact of daily life in 19th century America?

Picture it: The year is 1933, and you need a new coat! Chances are, you'd be headed to Hearn's. This department store, located on 14th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues from 1879 until 1955, was a New York shopping mecca.

The series finale of Mad Men that aired on AMC on May 17 roughly coincided with NYPL's digitization of over one-thousand fashion illustrations produced in the 1950s and '60s by New York City-based firm Creators Studios. See if you can spot the traces of the show's female protagonists in these ready-to-wear design drawings.

Remember how the neighborhood used to look? Well, for a very happy #TBT, we're indulging in some neighborhood nostalgia for Bushwick, Brooklyn.

What was the most viewed image on NYPL's Digital Collections platform in April 2015?

Digital Collections contains more than 800,000 digitized items, and that number grows every day. 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 there to advance knowledge and create new works.

Let Ask NYPL librarian that for you.

This exhibit highlights the transition from summer to fall by celebrating iconic film stars of the mid-20th century and the looks we have come to associate with them.

You may not normally think of Halloween as a holiday with its own stationery, but we have around 100 years worth of cards that prove otherwise.

Is there anybody out there who does not like trains? OK, perhaps more than a few people are fed up with their daily commute. Also, trains do sometimes fail us. It was very unfortunate that during the March Snowstorm of 1888 about seventy-five miles of the Long Island Railroad system was blockaded by the snow and that the street railroad system of Brooklyn became useless.

The New York Public Library offers a tremendous amount of material in e-format. We have been purchasing e-books for years including e-text, e-audio, e-music, and e-video. E-books include both fiction and non-fiction. Among the latter is Christian Wolmar's The Great Railroad Revolution.

That is, the kick-off to Shakespeare Week—April 15 to 20 here at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Schizophrenia, nomadism, Lacan (oh the joys of serendipity—I just ordered his Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Profession), Deleuze, all the quite-cut edge philosophers and concepts. 

The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the release of its Digital Collections API (application programming interface). This tool allows software developers both in and outside of the library to write programs that search our digital collections, process the descriptions of each object, and find links to the relevant pages on the NYPL Digital Gallery. We are very excited to see what the brilliant developers who use our digital library will create. In the following post, Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, Doug Reside, reflects on 

How do we love Christopher Walken? On his 70th birthday, let us count the ways. Star of film, TV, and NYPL's own iBook Point, somehow everyone has a favorite film that stars him, be it The Deer Hunter, True Romance, or Pulp Fiction. The consummate villain, he faced off

photo via flickr by tuppusWe here at AskNYPL get regular requests for digital images on different topics and we're always happy to share the New York Public Library's very own Digital Gallery. While the NYPL Digital Gallery does a wonderful job with its collection, making things easy to find and accessible, we don't always have the content folks are 

As the new movie Hitchcock has recently come into theaters, I am reminded of the silhouette so eloquently drawn at the beginning of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Before photography was a household staple, silhouettes provided an inexpensive way to record someone's likeness. And, as with Mr. Hitchcock, a shadow is often stunning in its ability to capture the likeness of a person or to tell a story.

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