The following teaser is from the New York Public Library blog.
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. 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. More technical posts on this work will follow.
Read the full article. It’s an extensive blog, with lots of good information and illustrations. Written by Philip Sutton, it was posted October 5, 2016.
Thanks to my friend, Cyndi Ingle, of Cyndislist for the heads-up!
