Histolines Releases over 20K photographs from NYPL archives

Histolines has just nearly doubled the number of photographs we have in our  knowledgebase by adding 20K photos released by New York Public Library(NYPL) open source project.

So far we’ve only been able to process just over 20K out of 180K photos that NYPL released. Rest of the photos lack name and date tagging. The posts that have been released are marked with NYPL_name as original contributor. They seamlessly integrate into Histolines timelines to add rich detail to already established timelines and created brand new ones for people and buildings that were not represented before. Most notably timeline of New York Public Library has gained tremendous amount of detail from its construction in 1904-1905 to more recent history.

Some of the data that was released by NYPL is flawed and despite our best efforts to clean it there are still few misstags and inconsistencies. But histolines update and problem finding features should help us filter misfits with time.

We are glad to enrich our photo collection and want to thank NYPL for forward thinking and releasing so much of their archive open source to the public. We are looking to find other databases that we can integrate to increase our knowledge base as well as writing data crawlers to gather some of this information.