NYPL Releases Free App To Promote Open Access to Its Research Collections
By Michael Kelley May 17, 2011To coincide with the beginning of its centennial week, the New York Public Library launched its first app today. Paul LeClerc, the library's president, said the free app, "Biblion: The Boundless Library," will be transformative.
"I think in terms of its creativity and importance it is going to knock the socks off everybody," LeClerc said Monday at a preview in the Trustees Room of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. "What we are demonstrating this afternoon to you is a new kind of warm, authentic, strong embrace of technology as a transformative means of liberating information," he said.
The app, in development since November, is available through iTunes, and it is the first in a series of apps that the library is planning to release in the coming months.
Biblion draws its inspiration from the library's old Biblion magazine about the library's collections, and it essentially opens up the boxes in the library's esteemed research collections and places curated items at anyone's fingertips, literally.
"These are boxes that many people would never be able to access and certainly even if they did it's one item at a time," said Deanna Lee, NYPL's VP for communications and marketing. Lee led a five-person team from NYPL that worked with an equivalent team from Potion, a New York-based design and technology firm, to develop the app.
"Now we are going to put these items in unlimited hands," Lee said.
The first edition of the app features 700 items from the library's "World of Tomorrow" 1939-40 New York World's Fair holdings, which is one of the library's largest collections, spanning 2500 boxes or about 1200 linear feet of material.
Exploiting the iPad's touch technology, the app presents users with a virtual map of documents, images, multimedia, and original scholarly essays that place the items in context and have been commissioned for this project.
"Biblion transfers the physical library experience, where you see the shape of books and understand what's inside them, into a multi-dimension digital application," Phillip Tiongson, a principal of Potion, said in a library press release. "We have given the content a shape, so people can intuitively understand what it looks like and want to dive into the story," he said.
The developers were mindful of the physical library experience.
"The serendipity of actually digging through archives is also included---we make connections for people," Angela Montefinise, the public relations director for NYPL, said. "For example, If you're reading an essay on the fate of the Czech pavilion as the war progressed, the app will direct you to other related items, such as a letter in the collection from the wife of the [head of the] Czech consulate, begging to run a sandwich stand because she couldn't go home," she said.
"The idea is that when you give people visual pathways into the stacks, infinite narratives emerge," Lee said.
The app drew upon the curatorial work of the Manuscript and Archives Division.
"A couple of years ago the Manuscripts and Archives Division staff undertook this massive process of reorganizing every single item in the boxes, and that was compiled into a massive finding aid," said David Riordan, technology coordinator for NYPL on the project. "And from that finding aid, working with the Manuscript and Archives Division, we were really able to construct the content of this. But this really opens the content up and makes it very transparent," he said.
The library is planning to release a web version of the app in the summer, and it plans to bring out two editions a year for the app, if resources allow, Lee said.
"In the library world we hear so much about ereaders making libraries obsolete," Lee said. "Well, I hope this is going to show people that rather than being a threat to libraries, libraries are the ones who can be the potential leaders in getting readers thinking about the reading process from new perspectives," she said.
