The document summarizes the New York Heritage Digital Collections Project, which provides free public access to digitized historical collections from across New York State. The project aims to connect 1,000 collections containing 1 million items. It acts as a gateway, allowing federated searches of digitized items from various regional councils. Collections come from libraries, museums, and archives, and represent a broad range of materials like photographs, letters, diaries, and newspapers. The digital collections can be used by educators, researchers, genealogists and others, and allow safer access to fragile historical materials. Participation is free for member institutions of the regional councils.

1. Fall 2013 Historian’s Regional Meeting November 2, 2013
Getting Your Documents , Pictures and
Newspapers On-Line
at

2. What is the New York
Heritage Digital
Collections Project?
• The New York Heritage Digital Collections website, a project of the NY3Rs
Councils, provides the public with free access to digitized collections of historical
and cultural interest in New York State.
• It acts as a gateway to digital heritage collections across New York State.
• It offers a federated search of multiple CONTENTdm servers from the regional
3Rs Councils.
• The goal of the project is to eventually connect 1000 collections and 1 million
items throughout New York State. At present there are about 300 members and
300,000 items.

3. There are Nine Regional 3Rs Councils

4. Background
• Each of the nine 3Rs began with their own
CONTENTdm sites - i.e., the one in the Rochester
area was eventually known as FLAG (Finger Lakes
and Genesee).
• Six of the nine 3Rs have combined their
CONTENTdm servers in the NY Heritage Digital
Collection site.
• Three of the nine 3Rs still maintain their own sites
(Long Island, NYCity Metro, Southeastern) but the
content of these three sites are searchable in the
NY Heritage Digital Collection.

5. The Collections
• The collections represent a broad range of
historical, scholarly and cultural materials.
• Collections are held in libraries, museums and
archives throughout the state.
• The collections are used by educators, students,
researchers, genealogists, alumni, and donors.
• Collection items include photographs, letters,
diaries, directories, maps, newspapers, books and
more.

6. How can the collections be used?
• School libraries can use the collections to
connect to the curriculum and promote the use
of primary source materials.
• Public libraries can promote local history.
• The project allows for the public’s safe use of a
library’s “delicate” materials.
• Researchers can search multiple collections by
location and item type.

7. facebook.com/newyorkheritage

8. pinterest.com/nyheritage

9. Here are some sample slides
from the project client.
This first one is from the
scanner software.
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11. A sample booklet
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15. Choose a type of search:
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21. An example of amplified data
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22. Fuller information on this man:
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23. There is also a blog:
This picture blinks
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24. The Bicentennial booklet is a “compound object” of 30 some pages
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25. This was greatly oversized, stitched together by the “Flip-Pal”:
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26. •
Various statistics can be obtained by
software collection: number of visits,
comments, and useful information to show
your Boards, funding sources, etc.
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27. Stats? You want stats?
Geneva Historical Society: 2,228 items
1726 page views in the past 5 months!
In 2012 alone, NY Heritage had over 160 collections total with over 320,834 items.
We had 2 million site views with 325,302 views of RRLC collections.
RRLC currently has 18 contributors.
More specifically:
Between November 28th, 2012 and March 31st, 2013, we had 13,071 visits to nyheritage.org from 9,044
Unique Visitors, which amounted to 37,442 page views.
Between August 27th, 2012 and November 28th, 2012, we had 5,728 visits from 3,935 unique visitors,
amounting to 23,534 page views.
Extrapolating from those figures, nyheritage.org had about 28,000 visits from April 1st, 2012 to March 31st,
2013, and about 130,000 page views from about 23,000 unique visitors.
Now that we are a going to be part of the service hub for DPLA, [Digital Public Library of America] we will
be included in that. This will be huge for our viewership.
Sound good to have your collection more accessible
?
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28. For training opportunities contact
Barbara Ciambor, bciambor@rrlc.org,
(585)223-7570

29. Interested in participating?
• Participation in the project is free to RRLC
member institutions.
• For information contact: Kourtney Blackburn,
kblackburn@rrlc.org, (585)223-7570.