Histolines Releases over 20K photographs from NYPL archives

Histolines has just nearly doubled the number of photographs we have in our knowledge base by adding 20K photos released by NYPL open source project.

So far we’ve only been able to process just over 20K out of 180K photos that NYPL released. Rest of the photos lack name and date tagging. The posts that have been released are marked with NYPL as original contributor. They seamlessly integrate into Histolines timelines to add rich detail to already established timelines and created brand new ones for people and buildings that were not represented before. Most notably timeline of New York Public Library has gained tremendous amount of detail from its construction in 1904-1905 to more recent history.

Some of the data that was released by NYPL is flawed and despite our best efforts to clean it there are still few misstags and inconsistencies. But histolines update and problem finding features should help us filter misfits with time.

We are glad to enrich our photo collection and want to thank NYPL for forward thinking and releasing so much of their archive open source to the public. We are looking to find and share other databases that we can integrate into our innovative history timeline to increase our knowledge base. We are also building  data crawlers to gather and organize information from unstructured sources.