With its activist collecting philosophy and its mission to preserve the unconventional documents of an unruly creative community, the Downtown Collection is hardly a typical archive. Since its inception in 1994, it has inspired new teaching, research, and writing, and exhibitions at NYU and elsewhere. But until now there has been no central place one can go to learn more about it.
As a supplement to the library’s portal to the Downtown Collection, we created Digital Downtown, a ready-made digital humanities resource. Digital Downtown is a multifaceted guide to using the Downtown Collection and to understanding the social and intellectual shifts that brought it into being and that continue to govern its curatorial vision. It also serves as a hub for relevant resources at NYU Libraries and across the university.
It is part of NYU’s central mission to support student research and promote socially-engaged pedagogy, and the Downtown Collection has offered a natural point of entry for teaching about underground art and activism in local communities, public history, the nature of archival curation, and the silences of the archive. Digital Downtown is intended to facilitate the teaching that NYU faculty and librarians are already doing with the Downtown Collection and to encourage new courses, aid students and researchers, and reach out to the wider public.
With Digital Downtown, we designed a resource we would want to use ourselves, a bridge connecting archive, classroom, and community. We hope the website will serve as an inspiring and accessible introduction to this remarkable collection.
–Tamar Barzel and David Sugarman, October 2018, New York City
Tamar Barzel, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist and Assistant Research Scholar with NYU Libraries, where she co-curates the Downtown Music Initiative and curates of Voices from the Downtown Music Scene, an oral history project. She has taught at Wellesley College, Harvard, and NYU. Her book, New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene (Indiana University Press, 2015), focuses on New York City’s downtown music scene in the 1980s–1990s.
David Sugarman is a Class Adviser and Associate Faculty at NYU Gallatin.
Site credits:
- Concept and content: Tamar Barzel and David Sugarman, except where indicated
- Faculty consultant: Prof. Thomas Augst, Dept. of English, NYU
- Library consultant: Nicholas Martin, Librarian for Fales Archival Collection & Reference Services, NYU Libraries
- Project development support: NYU Libraries
- Project director: Tamar Barzel
- Web design: David Sugarman
- Web hosts: NewYorkScapes and NYU Web Publishing
Copyright information:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
We have included images, audio, video, and outside texts on this site only when we have received permission, we have determined a work to be in the public domain, or we believe the way we have posted the material to be fair use as part of a non-commercial, educational website. Questions about reproducing images or other specific elements within the website should be addressed to the individual copyright holders. If you have additional or conflicting information about material you find on this website, including information about the copyright holder, please contact David Sugarman at dss368@nyu.edu.
Accessibility:
If you have difficulty accessing information or materials on the Digital Downtown website due to a disability, please contact the Lisa Gayhart, the Library’s Head of User Experience, lg153@nyu.edu, and provide the following information: the web address of the requested material, a description of the accessibility problem, the preferred format to receive the requested material, and your contact information (name, email address, and phone number).
Complaints about the website’s accessibility to individuals with disabilities can be made under NYU’s Website Accessibility Policy and should be addressed to the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), equal.opportunity@nyu.edu, 212-998-2370
Image credit: Cover image from God Is My Co-Pilot, Gender is as Gender Does, 1992 (7″ vinyl disc). Fales Library. Copyright Craig Flanagin.