The NYPL Digital Gallery

I was interested in covering the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, but every time I tried to visit it ran very sloooooowly which makes it tough to do a writeup. But thanks to a writeup in the Christian Science Monitor ( http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0321/p25s01-stin.html ) I see that the Digital Gallery is back and beefed up serverwise. You can get to it at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm .

And what is it? It's an online gallery of over 275,000 images digitized from sources in the New York Library's public collections. It's both searchable by keyword and set up in a series of browsable galleries.

Let's look at the galleries first; they're really nice. You can explore them by choosing one of seven different subject headers in the drop-down menu at the top of the screen, or you can see all the collections available at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all . They range from Africana & Black History to Yiddish Theatre Placards: Buenos Aires and New York.

I decided to look at "Taking the Wheel: Manufacturers' Catalogs from the First Decade of American Automobiles" which contains " Several hundred photomechanical reproductions from the pages of motor vehicle (automobiles and some trucks) manufacturers' catalogs from 1909" (all the collections have nice writeup summaries like this.)

You can either search within the images or look at all of the images, in this case 234. Images are listed twelve thumbnails to the page. Click on the thumbnail and get image caption, publication date, image ID, etc etc. There's also a slightly larger picture which you can click on gain to get an even larger picture. (These auto images are great; be sure to visit this collection.)

Keyword searching is also possible of the entire gallery; a full-gallery search for "valve" found 30 results, from piston valves to water closets to a plant image. Results are displayed just they're displayed when you're browsing a collection.

This is a great gallery, and the collections are so interesting I'd browse them first before doing a search.

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