NYU Digital Library Technology Services processes, enables access to and preserves digital materials that come from both the NYU community and from collaborating partner organizations. Our methods include digitization, software development, research, project coordination and the articulation of best practices. DLTS creates infrastructure and systems to advance networked scholarly communication and explores the questions raised by the use of these services as they continue to evolve.
If you have a project for consideration, please submit the Digital Project Proposal Short-Form.
Latest news
Spatial Data Repository: Upgrade for 2023 December 14, 2023 DLTS, in partnership with Archival Collections Management (ACM), Special Collections, and Application Architecture and Development (AAD), has launched the redesigned Finding Aids and Finding Aids publication system. …
Finding Aids Redesign: Understanding the Input November 7, 2023 DLTS, in partnership with Archival Collections Management (ACM), Special Collections, and Application Architecture and Development (AAD), has launched the redesigned Finding Aids and Finding Aids publication system. …
Finding Aids Redesign: The Design Process September 22, 2023 DLTS, in partnership with Archival Collections Management (ACM), Special Collections, and Application Architecture and Development (AAD), has launched the redesigned Finding Aids and Finding Aids publication system. …
New finding aids design launched August 29, 2023 Today, NYU Libraries completed the publication and indexing for more than 5,000 unique finding aids representing NYU’s archival repositories and two partners, The New-York Historical Society and The Center for Brooklyn History. The project to redesign the NYU Libraries finding aids was led by Digital Library Technology Services in close collaboration with Archival Collections Management and Special Collections. The team addressed three main objectives to: replace an outdated publishing method; address ongoing issues related to usability for patrons; and improve upon the presentation for digital archival objects. Those of you who work closely with archival content and its description will… …
Coca Crystal Video Recordings and Papers published July 11, 2023 Coca Crystal (1947-2016) was a journalist, television personality, and political activist. She contributed to the East Village Other, writing about counterculture politics with a strong focus on women's issues. …
Mirador IIIF viewer available for all books July 9, 2023 We have officially launched our Mirador pilot! This open-source, IIIF-ready viewing environment is a worthy alternative to our home-grown viewer. …
Conspiracy to blackmail, in 1805 Britain: trial text published June 29, 2023 We just published the Verbatim Report of the proceedings against Edwards and Passingham for conspiracy to blackmail George Townshend Forrester. This is the frank and unexpurgated text of a trial concerning alleged homosexual acts, which were illegal and taboo in Regency England …
Sir William Jones Manuscripts collection: 18th Century comparative linguistics studies June 14, 2023 We just published the manuscripts of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a British lawyer in India and pioneer of comparative linguistic studies. Included are documents in Sanskrit and Persian relating to astrology, botany and law. …
Syria collection published May 10, 2023 Acquired from photographer Xenia Nikolskaya and researcher Heba Habib, the Syria Collection includes 1,255 photographs including black and white gelatin silver prints and color photographs. …
A new home for Calabash September 14, 2022 In the summer of 2020, Digital Scholarship Services was approached by NYU professor Jacqueline Bishop about finding a new home for Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters. Multilingual and focused on centering unheard voices, Cal abash was a pioneering journal showcasing poetry, literature, and visual arts from across the Caribbean. The journal, which Dr. Bishop edited from 2000-2008, had since ceased publishing, and the NYU server that had been hosting the site was due to be retired. A team consisting of Zach Coble (Head, Digital Scholarship Services), Jonathan Greenberg (Digital Scholarly Publishing Specialist), Marii Nyrop (Digital Humanities… …
Data Repository Update August 2, 2022 Members of the Libraries' Ultraviolet Data Repository project team recently presented on their work at the Open Repositories conference in Denver. Laura Henze, Senior UX Designer in DLTS, presented on accessibility principles, recommendations for making institutional repositories accessible, and specific tools being employed by NYU Libraries. Kate Pechekhonova, Senior DevOps Engineer in DLTS, and Katie Wissel, Data Services and Public Policy Librarian, presented on the Libraries' collaborative approach to define data repository policies. Slides from their respective presentations can be found here. …
New guidelines for responsible scholarly publishing January 4, 2022 As the web expands and becomes more experiential, scholarly publications are no longer static, limited spaces where the user's functions are limited to scrolling and clicking. In the present day, an appendix for a digital scholarly work will include links to others publications or studies; even more frequently, an e-publication will feature interactive charts or streaming video content. A researcher's project website might encourage dialogue between the user and the site itself, creating new interrogative spaces in the digital academic world--and of course, new solutions for how to preserve those bytes for future scholars. NYU Libraries is pleased to share… …
Three Cheers and a Fond Farewell to Eric Stedfeld! July 1, 2021 A short celebration of our colleague and friend Eric Stedfeld, whose 23-year tenure at DLTS ends today. …
The Many-Handed Move of Research Workspace June 2, 2021 Research Workspace is a centrally located storage device that NYU users can mount locally on their desktops, allowing for large amounts of data to be accessed and shared. Continuing our work to maintain reliable service, the storage device that powers this service was relocated to a new facility as part of a large infrastructure reshuffle. …
Letters to the Sugar Plum Fairy May 13, 2021 We have just published the finding aid for the Joe Campbell Collection of Dorothy Dean Letters; these objects were photographed by the members of our Imaging Lab. …
The Big Ancient World Migration May 13, 2021 DLTS successfully moved over 200 books from the original Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL) site to the new site. This process took several attempts over a period of years to make it happen. …
New, Flash-Free HIDVL February 16, 2021 The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, preserves and makes accessible videos documenting the expression of social and political life through performance in the many cultures and political landscapes of the Americas. This partnership dates back many years, and the current collection includes more than 1,100 individual titles. Our recent project to reformat and republish the collection was prompted by the sunsetting of Adobe Flash technology. As a result, viewers no longer need Flash in order to view streaming content online. Our project team also: Added… …
Wrecked Beach to Recognized Speech: AI Transcription Correction December 23, 2020 It’s an oft-repeated anecdote that when demonstrating the first vocoders (the data compression of audio signals containing speech and voice), Manfred Shcroeder, a German physicist for Bell Laboratories, noted that the machines and the people hearing them repeatedly tangled themselves in homophonic webs: the word “relationship,” clipped and compressed for transmission, sounded like “real Asian ship.” Ironically, he noted that the phrase “How to recognize speech,” fed into a vocoder and heard from the other end, disassembled into the nonsensical “How to wreck a nice beach.” As stewards and creators of digitized archival material, our first challenge lies in capturing… …
Spanish Civil War Poster Collection December 18, 2020 We have just published the finding aid for the Spanish Civil War Poster Collection, including digitizing many of these gorgeous and important artifacts. …
A/V captions and transcripts; Soul of Reason September 24, 2020 Our latest win is many wins in one! We just rolled out the infrastructure to be able to display captions and transcripts for A/V content. We published captions and transcripts for “Soul of Reason” …
Arabic Collections Online update: highlighting PDF downloads July 8, 2020 Announcing a multi-part win for DLTS: the highlighting of PDF downloads on the ACO site. …
Research Workspace & High Performance Computing Archive upgrades June 17, 2020 Today, we successfully upgraded the software on the device that powers Research Workspace as well as HPC Archive. …
Searchable PDFs now live: The Masses April 22, 2020 Announcing our first collection with searchable PDFs! …
Institute of Afro-American Affairs Audio Published May 14, 2018 The Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University was founded in 1969 to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora. The collection includes recordings dating from 1971 to 1986 of The Soul of Reason, a radio talk show that aired on commercial radio station WNBC and NYU's station WNYU. This collection was digitized over a period of years and it took a bit of untangling on the part of DLTS, University Archives, and Archival Collections Management to prepare this collection for publication. It is now available online, and the recordings… …
Audio collections are coming! April 13, 2018 DLTS published our first full audio collection, Fales's Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Archive, earlier this year. We've been hard at work on the next several collections, including a re-publication of Voices from the Food Revolution that allows HTML5 streaming (and removes the need for Flash). Each collection has proven to have its challenges, but our workflow is improving, and we should be publishing hundreds of hours of audio very soon. …