Lou Reed Archives Head to New York Public Library; New York Times, March 2, 2017

Ben Sisario, New York Times; 

Lou Reed Archives Head to New York Public Library

"Ms. Anderson said that the library’s mandate of making its collections available to the public was central to her decision to place the archive there. But she also felt that it all simply belonged in New York.

“Lou is kind of Mr. New York,” Ms. Anderson said. “This is the city he loved the most. It doesn’t make any sense for him to be anywhere else. Then, what’s the best place in New York? This is the best place in New York.”

She also giggled a little, and made a mock librarian’s shush, as she added: “I just love that somebody who is so loud is in the New York Public Library.”"

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive; New York Times, 1/6/16

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times; New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive:

"But the game is what you might call a marketing teaser for a major redistribution of property, digitally speaking: the release of more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain items from the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files — along with an invitation to users to grab them and do with them whatever they please.

Digitization has been all the rage over the past decade, as libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of items and posted them online. But the library’s initiative (nypl.org/publicdomain), which goes live on Wednesday, goes beyond the practical questions of how and what to digitize to the deeper one of what happens next...

A growing number of institutions have been rallying under the banner of “open content.” While the library’s new initiative represents one of the largest releases of visually rich material since the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam began making more than 200,000 works available in high-quality scans free of charge in 2012, it’s notable for more than its size.

“It’s not just a data dump,” said Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, a consortium that offers one-stop access to digitized holdings from more than 1,300 institutions.

The New York Public has “really been thinking about how they can get others to use this material,” Mr. Cohen continued. “It’s a next step that I would like to see more institutions take.”

Most items in the public-domain release have already been visible at the library’s digital collections portal. The difference is that the highest-quality files will now be available for free and immediate download, along with the programming interfaces, known as APIs, that allow developers to use them more easily."

Trace the past with NY Public Library's Open Access Maps Project; CNet, 4/7/14

Bonnie Burton, CNet; Trace the past with NY Public Library's Open Access Maps Project:

"For over 15 years, the Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library has been scanning maps from all over the world including those of the Mid-Atlantic United States from 16th to 19th centuries and even topographic maps of Austro-Hungarian empire ranging from 1877 and 1914.

Most notably, the NYPL has scanned more than 10,300 maps from property, zoning, and topographic atlases of New York City dating from 1852 to 1922.

There's also a "diverse collection of more than 1,000 maps of New York City, its boroughs and neighborhoods, dating from 1660 to 1922, which detail transportation, vice, real estate development, urban renewal, industrial development and pollution, political geography among many, many other things," NYPL posted in late March on its blog.

These and many more of the 20,000 cartographic works scanned are now available as high-resolution downloads for anyone who wants to visit their site.

"We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions," NYPL posted. "To the extent that some jurisdictions grant NYPL an additional copyright in the digital reproductions of these maps, NYPL is distributing these images under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.""

At NYPL, No “Smackdown” This Time As Panel Pushes For Google Book Search Settlement; Publishers Weekly, 7/29/09

Andrew Albanese via Publishers Weekly; At NYPL, No “Smackdown” This Time As Panel Pushes For Google Book Search Settlement:

"In what New York Public Library (NYPL) director David Ferriero called a return to the scene of the “Google smackdown,” the sold-out November 2005 event where the initial lawsuits over Google Book Search were first debated, panelists yesterday took questions from Ferriero and audience members and defended the pending Google Book Search Settlement.

The two-hour panel, "Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement,” featured David Drummond, senior v-p of corporate development & chief legal officer at Google; Richard Sarnoff, co-chairman, Bertelsmann, authors Jim Gleick and Peter Petre, and attorney and library legal advisor Jonathan Band, author of A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement. The panel kicks off a week of events in New York as the settlement enters a critical final month before a September 4 deadline for rightsholders to opt-out or object to the deal."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6673684.html

With Flickr Layoffs, Whither 'The Commons'?, Wired.com, 12/30/08

Via Wired.com: With Flickr Layoffs, Whither 'The Commons'?:

"In mid-December, when Yahoo laid off George Oates, one of the original employees of the photo-sharing website Flickr, Oates immediately feared for The Commons, Flickr's project to have its millions of members turn their distributed intelligence to the world's photo archives.

Though less than a year old, The Commons hosts tens of thousands of copyright-free historical photos from 17 cultural institutions including the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library."

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/with-layoffs-wh.html