Resources from past centuries will soon be digitized and available to all, thanks to the new initiatives proposed by the Queens Library.
The library’s Long Island Division, which documents the areas of Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk, will be upgraded and modified, allowing it to henceforth be known as “The Archives at Queens Library”.
The new name will better reflect its unique resources, which include rare books; photos; maps and newspapers documenting the neighborhoods, prominent families and businesses, which will be available online.
According to John Hyslop, digital asset manager, there are “hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary materials documenting Queens’ social, economic, political, and physical history that historians, students and genealogists from around the world want to see.”
A group of specialists was brought together from among the library’s staff to work on the project. It involves taking the resources and making everything organized, catalogued, digitized and preserved so they can be searchable over the Internet.
The library’s top priority is to be more accessible and useful, by giving customers what they want.
Associate director of communications at Queens Library, Joanne King, explained how the plan to digitize has been in the works for a long time but it required grant funding and finding the right types of technologies to use before starting up. The project itself started up only six months ago.
“Since the development of the Internet, we wanted to try and make our resources more available,” King stated. “The Queens Library gets requests from international researchers who would like to access our information. None of this has been possible at this point unless you are actually standing in the library. We are thinking toward the future.”
The first collection to go online will be the Hal B. Fullerton Photographs, which consists of 399 photos documenting scenes and neighborhoods all over Long Island between 1880 and 1910.
According to King, the Fullerton collection should all be online by the end of 2010 – but it will take decades before all the resources are available on the Internet.
Hal B. Fullerton Photos Courtesy of The Queens Library
A family on their way to an outing at Long Beach in 1901.
Long Island Railroad executives at a gathering in Garden City in 1897.
Motoring at the corner of Jamaica Avenue and Parsons Boulevard in 1901.
