Category: Projects

Though my involvement as project manager of NYU’s Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library dates from 2004, this project is even older than that. And we continue to add new materials and provide new services to this collection. Over the 10+ years that this archive has been under development, we’ve seen so many of the technologies mature and change, and many of our workflows and services have evolved to accommodate new video formats, bandwidth capacity, video streaming standards, and video player functionality.

In addition to updating the technologies used in a long-term project, sometimes you also need to step back and take a look at your whole production workflow –from submission through publication–to identify legacy practices and suss out inefficiencies. That’s exactly what we’re doing this semester for the HIDVL project. We’ll spend the next few months implementing a new video submission and editing workflow that should make publishing much more efficient and allow us to get more video onto the HIDVL website more quickly.

That way we can get you faster to Reverend Billy and all that other HIDVL goodness. 

Items from the Judson Memorial Church Archive – over 10,000 images – are now live and available to the public. This collection from Fales Library spans nearly two centuries (1839-2001). During that time, Judson Memorial Church was a center of worship and of social activism such as civil rights, anti-war, reproductive rights, and the women’s movement. In addition, it became a center for avant-garde art ranging from its role in the artistic revolt against Abstract Expressionism, to postmodern dance at the Judson Dance Theater, to the Judson Poets Theater.

We have launched a Web site for NYU Press to provide open access to some of their books. The site, located at openaccessbooks.nyupress.org, offers several dozen books for reading on a computer, tablet, or phone. It’s powered by Readium, a javascript-based, open-source package for handling EPUB files in a browser. The requirements for this project were interesting: we needed to provide a good online reading experience for users without allowing them to download the books. As it turns out, we don’t know of anyone else who has a project quite like this one. Most EPUB-related software is focused on allowing users to read the books they have on their devices (i.e., books they have downloaded). Even Readium was designed originally for this purpose, but it’s flexible enough that we were able to use it for our project. We will be adding features to the site over the next few months, and NYU Press intends to add more books over time. We have also built the site in such a way that we can use the EPUB-reading platform more generally. If other EPUB collections come along, we will be ready to receive them.

Certain collections contain materials with multiple copyright holders. Even if NYU Libraries owns a collection, we may or may not be able to make all of its materials available to the public online. For this reason, Special Collections developed a take-down policy. At long last, thanks to the tenacity of several individuals (not least of whom was Michael Stoller), the policy has been approved and posted on the Fales Web site.

This means that some collections, including the very extensive Judson Memorial Church Archive as well as the Mendez Mural Community Garden Archive, can be made available. We are very excited to move these collections forward. Watch this space for an update when these collections are live!