Center for Brooklyn History
Reviewed by: Carolyn McDonough and Miriam Moster
Review started: February 9, 2021
Review finished: April 25, 2021
Site Links
- Center: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/locations/center-for-brooklyn-history (was https://www.brooklynhistory.org when the review was started)
- Oral History Collections: https://oralhistory.brooklynhistory.org/
Data and Sources
- More than 1,200 interviews with Brooklynites documenting their lives in the borough in the 20th and 21st centuries
- Maps
- Newspapers
- Art and artifacts
- Audio and video recording
- Telephone directories
Processes
- Interviews have been recorded and metadata written; they have been made searchable by project and geography; time-stamped transcripts or indexes have been created with the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer
- Archival preservation, digitization, and presentation are a major research focus and initiative of the center
- Photograph, film, video (visual); audio/sound; artifact collection and cataloging
- Community inclusion and engagement in collecting material and outreach
Presentation
- Searchable site integrated into the Brooklyn Public Library’s website
Digital Tools Used to Build It
- Oral History Collections: Oral History Metadata Synchronizer; XML programming language; WordPress Storehouse and WordPress Client plugins; WordPress page templates
- Wappalyzer analysis of https://www.bklynlibrary.org/locations/center-for-brooklyn-history: Drupal content management system; Cloudflare and jsDelivr content delivery network; jQuery, jQuery UI, and Slick JavaScript libraries; PHP programming language; Choices.js select box/text input plugin; Google Tag Manager; Font Awesome font scripts
Languages
- The site is translatable into these languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), French, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish
- This site was reviewed in English
Review
Center History and Overview
Reviewed by: Carolyn McDonough
In October 2021, the landmark Brooklyn Historical Society officially became the Center for Brooklyn History building, located on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. (Until 1985, the Brooklyn Historical Society was known as the Long Island Historical Society.) The building itself dates to 1878–81 and has been described as one of the city’s historical treasures. Brooklyn Public Library President and CEO Linda E. Johnson is quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as saying, “Brooklyn Historical Society’s collection will now be free and accessible to Brooklyn Public Library’s cardholders in every neighborhood across our borough...The Center for Brooklyn History will democratize an astounding archive of our collective past, help us understand our present, and shape our city’s future.”
This transition—from historical society to center—is significant and evident in the website’s vast digital content collections. Designed on a very high order of magnitude to accommodate digital content, the site offers virtual events (due to ongoing COVID-19 closure), multiple online exhibitions, remote research guidance via the Othmer Library, and blogs, such as Photo of the Week (note: the blogs do not seem to have migrated over to their new URL, or at least are not easy to find). Therefore, the content is archival as well as user generated and participatory. The site also hosts Online Projects. At the time this review was started, there were three projects featured: Portal to the Past, Revealing Long Island History, and Muslims in Brooklyn. Each project has its own dedicated area, with a gateway page describing the mission and research status of the project and funding acknowledgement, which, in some cases, includes National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants. The projects are ambitious in scope, and the visual content within them is presented honestly and expertly.
Additional Center Projects and Collections
Reviewed by: Miriam Moster
In addition to these projects, the site also houses and/or links to:
- an oral history archive with over 1,200 interviews organized into projects by theme or geography; interviews are easily searchable with time-stamped transcripts accompanying them
- a collection of over 1,500 historical maps (still images) dating from the 17th century of the five boroughs and New England
- open access books
- archival collection of additional material, including newspapers, arts and artifacts, audio and video recordings, and telephone directories
- In Pursuit of Freedom, a multi-platform project exploring Brooklyn’s anti-slavery movement; project includes interactive pedagogic games, maps, a walking tour guide, and additional written content
- the COVID-19 Project, which includes an oral history component in addition to a digital photograph collection and for which they are currently collecting artifacts and digital content