By Patrick Donachie
Items from the Archives at Queens Library are now available for people to view online, Queens Library President and CEO Dennis Walcott announced last week.
Walcott joined Councilman I. Daneek Miller (D-St. Albans) and state Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-Hollis) at an announcement at the Queens Central Library in Jamaica. According to Walcott, 12,000 items from the archives collection are available for online perusal. They also celebrated renovations done to space at the Central Library where the archives are stored.
“The digital archives website and the relocation and renovation of the archives space will give the public a new level of access to our collections and services, and help them discover a treasure trove of historical information about their families, their neighborhoods and the development of the great borough of Queens,” Walcott said.
The Archives at Queens Library has collected more than 50,000 items since 1912, detailing the history of the four counties that originally comprised Long Island, including Queens, Kings, Nassau and Suffolk, before New York City consolidated in 1898.
The new space for the archives features climate-controlled storage units to preserve the older items, and users accessing the archives online will be able to search through the contents by neighborhood, material type and collection name. The archives include maps, books, newspapers, musical scores, and thousands of photographs from throughout the history of the four counties.
The archives can be accessed online at digit
Reach reporter Patrick Donachie by e-mail at pdona
