Department of Records - Municipal Library Notes - March 2022

Municipal Library Notes

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Municipal Library Notes - March 2022

SPOTLIGHT ON PLAYGROUNDS

Spotlight on: Playgrounds

By Christine Bruzzese, Director, Municipal Library

With the approach of spring and warmer weather, New Yorkers of all ages will be visiting parks and playgrounds. Here are some resources in the Municipal Library on playgrounds.

The New York City Department of Parks published a two-volume set of photos and diagrams of various playgrounds in the five boroughs covering the years 1941-1961. A press release accompanies the illustrations, announcing the opening of each playground and providing background information. Here are a diagram and photo of a playground on Vleigh Place in Queens that opened in January 1952. Originally known as the Vleigh Place Playground, the name was changed in 2008 to the Judge Moses Weinstein Playground.

During the La Guardia administration, the Department of Parks and the Board of Education began working together to expand and improve playground facilities throughout the city. Fort Hamilton High School Athletic Field was the first playground to open operated by this partnership. Here is an image of four playgrounds from the report "Jointly Operated Playgrounds," published by the Department of Parks and Board of Education.

The Department of City Planning established a Special Projects Unit to begin working on programs for persons with disabilities in 1974. One of the projects was designing a playground would provide play space for disabled as well as able-bodied children. "A Playground for All Children" dated 1978 provides more information. Here are designs from one of the winning entries in a competition that was held for architects and students to submit their plans.

Municipal Library Notes March 1922 New York City Green Book

By Christine Bruzzese, Director, Municipal Library

The March 1, 1922 issue of Municipal Library Notes features a short piece on the publication of the 1922 Official Directory of the City of New York. It has come to be known more informally as the Green Book. This publication not only includes information on city, state and federal government offices in the city but also statistics on budget, population, a list of all NYC mayors and more.

Below are 2 pages from the 1922 edition of the Official Directory of the City of New York with information about the Fire Department.

The Historical Vital Records of NYC

The Department of Records and Information Services launched Historical Vital Records of NYC just over a week ago. The site features more than nine million birth, death, and marriage records, all freely available to browse, search and download. In less than 24 hours after the launch, people from across the globe - in Europe, United Kingdom, Australia, China, New Zealand, Argentina, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Fiji - to name just a few places, visited the site.

The Municipal Archives has always endeavored to use advances in technology to expand and facilitate access to its vast holdings. About ten years ago, DORIS leadership began promoting the benefits of digitizing the historical vital record collection. Their arguments were persuasive, and funding was made available beginning in 2013.

It was an incredibly layered undertaking that involved setting up the financial, physical, and digital infrastructures to support the long-term project. In the first phase, Assistant Commissioner Kenneth Cobb procured contracts with eDocNY, a New York State Industries for the Disabled vendor, to digitize the records. Cobb led a team of technologists, database managers, digitization technicians, metadata creators, collections managers, preservation and conservation staff, to ensure the project's success.

The vendor eDocNY produced excellent high-quality, full-color scans of the certificates - a vast improvement over the microfilmed images previously available. The digital images helped to improve accuracy in transcribing the records and provided another opportunity to engage with genealogy partners who, since 2003, had been indexing the collections from microfilmed and hard copy sources.

The next phase was to make the new digital records available to a broader audience. In 2017, DORIS launched an application built by in-house developers that allowed reference staff to fulfill requests for vital record copies more efficiently and accurately using the new color images. The vital records application also provided onsite patrons with the ability to search and view the records. The “app” was a pivotal steppingstone.

Once the digitization project with eDocNY successfully digitized more than eight million records, DORIS pivoted to digitizing the Marriage License series in-house. Over the past several years more than one million records have been digitized, preserved, and made available. The project was interrupted during the pandemic and picked up again in August 2021. This work is on-going.

Further, City archivist Patricia Glowinski has begun working on a comprehensive guide to the New York City vital records documenting records created and/or maintained by the City of New York, and vital records created and/or maintained by municipalities that were once located within the boundaries of the present-day five Boroughs that were dissolved or annexed before 1898. The collection includes birth, marriage, and death registers, certificates, and indexes, and marriage licenses, 1760-1949 (with gaps).

The agency's application development team tested a variety of open-source approaches to making the vital records available in a timeframe that internet users expect. They built a robust, secure, easy-to-use platform, capable of handling a large volume of users simultaneously. As a result, on day one, more than 25,000 users accessed the site and downloaded 12,000 records. After one week, we have had 1.8 million views and 56,000 downloads.

With each step, access to the collections increases, and the Municipal Archives continues to build and sustain industry-standard plans to manage the physical and digital collections, and the associated descriptions that provide access points. It is to the credit and expertise of archivists, conservators, and reference and research professionals at the New York City Municipal Library and Archives, that these collections will survive for future generations, and continue to enrich the research experience of people and communities around the world.

Stay tuned for more announcements!

Celebrate Olmsted Bicentennial: The Greensward Plan for The Central Park

By External Affairs

In honor of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted's 200th birthday, the NYC Department of Records & Information Services will host a pop-up exhibition at 31 Chambers Street featuring the rarely seen original Greensward plan - the winning master plan submitted in 1858 by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as part of the proposal for the Central Park design competition. The plan is considered a masterpiece of 19th century landscape architecture.Timed tickets for 30-minute slots on April 22nd, 11am - 7pm and April 23rd, 10am - 4pm are available.

Learn more and RSVP here.

To learn more about upcoming events, please sign up for our Events Mailing List.

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