viz.

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer 

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.