In 2015, the Knight Foundation funded the Culture in Transit project, a collaboration between the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) and Queens Public Library (QL) to bring mobile scanning equipment to smaller libraries, archives, museums, and the communities they serve. The project offers community members and smaller cultural institutions an opportunity to obtain digital copies of their materials using state-of-the-art equipment. Through community scanning events at branch libraries, Culture in Transit empowers NYC residents to take an active role in chronicling their local cultural heritage. Digitized materials are in turn added to the Queens and Brooklyn’s collections and made available via their online catalogs. At the same time, through METRO’s work with small cultural heritage institutions, hidden institutional collections are digitized and shared with the public through METRO’s online portal. All materials contributed as part of this project are being harvested by the Empire State Digital Network and will be included in the Digital Public Library of America. Our outreach-centered digitization model aims to democratize and diversify NYC’s historical record.
Project lead, Anne Karle-Zenith (METRO) and Queens Library lead, Natalie Milbrodt, will share some of the strategic and logistical thinking that has gone into the Culture in Transit program so far, and discuss the nature of the collaboration across its three partner institutions. They will share lessons learned by the Libraries about the real needs of private individuals in making the leap from a snapshot in a photo album to a record in the DPLA, as well as METRO’s efforts in identifying institutions that have appropriate collections who are also ready to work within the parameters of our on-site digitization model. This talk will be helpful for those interested in outreach and wondering how to establish partnerships between larger institutions capable of sharing digitization and metadata creation resources and smaller organizations in need of that help.
