NYU Engineering School to Digitize 120 Years of City Record Issues
New York University'sTandon School of
Engineering has received more than a quarter of a million
dollars to digitize The
City Record, a newspaper recording legal, real estate and
government news in
New York City for the past 140 years.
The National
Endowment for the Humanities gave
the school a $260,000 grant for the project that will be headed by
Professor
Jonathan Soffer, chair of the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at
the engineering school.
The
plan is to digitize 1,723 volumes — 1 million
pages — from the City Record for the years between 1873 and 1998 when
the daily
newspaper became available online.
The
digitized material will be available to the
public at no cost via nyc.gov and can be used for
research by students, bankers,
home buyers, historians and journalists, among others.
The
City Record has been published every weekday
since 1873. It was founded in the wake of the Tweed Ring scandals of
that year
in an effort to make government more transparent. Among the types of
information in its pages are:
- Minutes
of every city council and board of
estimate meeting;
- Contracts,
payments and bids for water, sewers
and streets;
- The
disposition of lawsuits against the city; and
- Weekly
reports of death, health and weather.
"We
believe that the digitization of The City
Record will have an important impact on urban history and economics,
and across
the social science disciplines," Soffer said. "Due to the location of
the
portal on the heavily used nyc.gov Web site and the diversity of the
data, we
believe that this project will have an unusually large audience."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.