Research Tools: “New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Launches Free Digital Archive of Designation Photos”

From the Architects Newspaper:

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has launched a robust digital photo repository of designated buildings and historic districts spanning all five boroughs. The free-to-use and easy-to-access searchable archive, dubbed the LPC Designation Photo Collection, is geared to serve not only as a resource for journalists, armchair historians, and everyday New Yorkers curious about landmarked sites in their own neighborhoods, but also to building owners, architects, and contractors, who can download designation photos of properties when considering potential work.

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More From the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission:

The LPC Designation Photo Collection, available at https://nyclandmarks.lunaimaging.com/, allows user to search for images by landmark name, address, block and lot number, and landmark number. The digital photo archive is enhanced by LPC’s historic building data, which includes building-by-building information on more than 37,500 buildings. This enhancement offers additional search and filter functions that will allow users to search images by architect, style, construction date, building type, or materials. For more information on how to navigate the archive, please visit, How to Navigate the LPC Photo Archive on the main page.

The images in the LPC Designation Photo Collection are an interesting mix of 35 mm black-and-white and color film, medium and large format negatives, color slides, and miscellaneous darkroom prints and Polaroids. Given the advances in photography, LPC transitioned from analog to digital photography in 2004. Though most of the images were taken by staff photographers working for the agency, some images have been donated and submitted by historic preservation advocacy groups. The LPC Designation Photo Collection is just part of the agency’s photo archive. It will be regularly updated with newly digitized and catalogued images. All photos can be downloaded from the archive at no cost. Any reproduction of archive photos must credit the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as the source.

LPC will be offering a webinar on Tuesday, September 20 at 6 pm to provide a tutorial of the digital photo archive. To register, go to https://forms.office.com/g/7x6TN1A99X.

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Filed under: Data Files, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Preservation