City Directories: 137 years of NYC History

Meetup location: Berger Forum (Room 227) - 2nd Floor

NYPL is digitizing its entire run of New York City Directories, 1786 through 1923, and will serve them free through the NYPL Digital Collections portal (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/). These volumes are packed with data about historic New York including lists of the names and addresses of its residents, schools, courts, businesses and much more. As the volumes are digitized, the NYC Space/Time Directory project (http://spacetime.nypl.org/) is using OCR, machine learning and crowdsourcing to extract data from each volume and turn them into open data sets about NYC's history.

Join us to hear more about these rich resources, how staff are working to make them more accessible, how you can work with the extracted data yourself, and to learn about 19th century New York.

Examples:

• New York City Directory 1854-1855 (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/new-york-city-directory-for-1854-1855-thirteenth-publication#/?tab=navigation)
• Wilson's Business Directory of New York City 1861-1862 (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3a9b2580-a3ce-0131-1ee7-58d385a7b928#/?uuid=3bc3e500-a3ce-0131-6ed8-58d385a7b928)
• New York City Directory 1915 (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/babb1540-72c1-0134-3e6f-00505686a51c#/?uuid=bb986650-72c1-0134-a3ac-00505686a51c)

https://a248.e.akamai.net/secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/8/f/6/600_455910966.jpeg

Schedule:

6:00 PM: Doors/welcome
6:20 PM: Phil Sutton - Librarian at NYPL - City Directories

• New York Public Library Digitizes 137 Years of New York City Directories (https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/09/21/new-york-city-directories-free-online)

6:50 PM: Gergely Baics (https://barnard.edu/profiles/gergely-baics)- Assistant Professor of History and Urban Studies at Barnard College

• Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10876.html)
• Mapping as Process: Food Access in Nineteenth-Century New York (https://globalurbanhistory.com/2016/05/17/mapping-as-process-food-access-in-nineteenth-century-new-york/#more-1139)
• Old Maps, New Tricks: Digital Archaeology in the 19th-Century City (http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/06/old-maps-new-tricks-digital-archaeology-in-the-19th-century-city/)

7:20 PM: Bert Spaan - NYC Space/Time Directory - data & APIs

More information:

• http://spacetime.nypl.org
• http://digitalcollections.nypl.org