News12 Brooklyn featured Tula Giannini, Dean, School of Information and Library Science; Caridad Bojorquez, a Masters in Information and Library Science Degree Candidate; and Jacob Nadal, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, and Director of Library and Archives, Brooklyn Historical Society, in a segment that aired on Monday, March 4. Giannini, Bojorquez, and Nadal were interviewed by News12 Brooklyn about Brooklyn Visual Heritage, a new website that engages users with digitized images from the collections of Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), Brooklyn Museum (BM), and Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS). The website was created as part of Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research, and Technology), a three-year collaborative project initiated by Pratt with funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Pratt-SILS students including Bojorquez worked with the staff from BPL, BM, and BHS to digitize thousands of historical photographs of Brooklyn.
Project CHART builds on earlier collaborations between Pratt-SILS and each of the cultural institution partners, whose historical photographic collections represent their rich holdings. The Brooklyn Public Library, the fifth largest public library in the United States, has an extensive image collection documenting Brooklyn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including photographs of subway construction and early immigrant neighborhoods. The photographic holdings of the Brooklyn Historical Society, a nationally recognized urban history center that includes a museum, scholarly research library, and educational center, include images from the 1977 Blackout as well as photographs of Brooklyn sites and residents dating from the 1800s through the 1970s. Images to be digitized from the Brooklyn Museum, one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country, include several documentary photographs, lantern slides, and postcards that are not readily available on the internet and feature buildings that no longer exist in the borough.
For more information on Brooklyn Visual Heritage, please visit http://www.brooklynvisualheritage.org/