New York City Directories 1849/50-1923

[Janet]

New York Public Library Digitizes 137 Years of New York City Directories
by Philip Sutton, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
October 5, 2016

You can read the whole blog post in the link above for yourself. It's quite interesting. But I'll show you some juicy snippets here.

"New York Public Library is digitizing its collection of New York City Directories, 1786 through 1922/3, serving them free through the NYPL Digital Collections portal. The first batch—1849/50 through 1923—have already been scanned, and the 1786–1848/9 directories are right now being scanned."

He says further:

"The whole collection will be going online over the coming months. Staff at NYPL are currently teaching computers to read the wobbly typeset, to interpret the strange abbreviations, and the occasionally slightly less than geometric layout of the directories to make the old print text machine readable. The goal is to make the directories text searchable in powerful new ways, in order to build datasets that will inform research in New York City history, genealogy, and beyond."

[...]

"Initially the city directories will be browseable, through NYPL Digital Collections, but the Library wants to make the directories work harder, to integrate them with other digital collections: maps, deeds, census records, family histories, prints, photographs, and so on. The directories will eventually be text searchable, enabling researchers to create new datasets."

I realize you've probably got your nose stuck right now into the GRO Online Historic Indexes like me. But if you have anyone in the U.S. to track down, it looks as if the NYPL is very worth keeping an eye on.

[kiterunner]

Nice. Thanks, Janet. I hope they make them searchable soon!

[Janet]

That makes two of us, Kite. And fingers crossed they manage to teach their computers to interpret the OCR scans better than some others we know.