Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Help Geotag New York's History


You can now help the New York Public Library geotag its collection of vintage photographs of New York City. The NYPL's new Surveyor map is a citizen science project designed to hep the library index its collections of historical photographs by location.

Visit the new Surveyor website and you will be shown a vintage photograph from the NYPL collection. All you have to do is show the location depicted in the photo by clicking on the interactive map. Luckily many of the photographs have an address in the photo's title or associated data. This makes the task relatively easy, even if you don't know New York very well.

You also don't need to worry about not knowing the location shown in a photo. If this is the case you just need to press the 'skip' button to move on to the next photo.

Many of the photos in the NYPL's Digital Collections are in the public domain. This means that you will be able to use many of the photos that you geotag in your own interactive maps. Just like OldNYC has done with its interactive map of 40,000 vintage photos of New York from the NYPL’s photo collections.

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