This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event, featuring a presentation by Henry Felix Raine, Director of the Library Digital Program at the New York Historical. It was recorded on April 8, 2026.
Announcer 0:01
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live!, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event featuring a presentation by Henry Felix Raine, director of the library digital program at the New York Historical it was recorded on April 8, 2026
Henry Felix Raine 0:29
Good morning everyone, and thank you, Alison, thank you Metro for inviting me to speak. I'm very happy to be here. It's a cold day, so I'm happy not to be upstate at Metro's library field, freezing my off. Today, my presentation is, I'm not going to be showing you pretty pictures of nice collections at the historical I'm still calling it the Historical Society, because I've been there a long time. I'm not going to show you the collections, per se, but I'm going to be talking about the projects more than the collections, and specifically about how we have tried to fund our digitization efforts over the years, and the challenges having to do with funding and sustainability, which I'm sure that You've all experienced as well. So one thing, one point I want to make is, in the course of these 25 years, the cost of digitization itself, scanning things, creating these digital images, has dropped dramatically and but other costs have increased a great deal. So that's that's one of the points I want to make. So the question of sustainability, I really don't have any answers to that, but I hope that I can at least raise some questions that we can maybe discuss during the Q and A later. Yeah,
Henry Felix Raine 2:03
which button Am I pressing? Sorry.
Henry Felix Raine 2:19
So we did our first digital project, and it was launched in 2001 but it actually took two years to do, and it was only 2000 images. So it took us two years to produce 2000 images of our Civil War collections. We were trying to showcase our what we called Civil War treasures. It also cost $98,000 so that gives you a sense of the cost of digitalization at that time. And it's it's really kind of amazing to think how much you could do with $98,000 now, that is one huge change in 25 years. I had to actually look for this on the way back machine, because it doesn't exist anymore. And it's interesting also to see what things look like 25 years ago, and also the decisions that were made, which I don't fully recall, but why we had a Confederate soldier and a Union soldier sitting together like their best friends, not clear. So I'm sure somebody decided that that was appropriate at the time,
Henry Felix Raine 3:28
and it was, it was a move to the next one,
Henry Felix Raine 3:35
and you can see some of the details. So, one thing to bring out is the high cost of digitization, but also the high cost of creating descriptive metadata, which really has remained a high cost for us over the years. In this case, we were actually using metadata that was created through a separately funded project, and that has been kind of what we've done over the years, we've had other funding to catalog our collections, and we've used that metadata to provide access to our digital collections. This was a project that was funded by the National Digital Library for the Library of Congress, and the images were the there was no cause for storage because the images were stored by the Library of Congress in perpetuity, and actually in perpetuity really meant only until the mid 2000 10s, when I had a new boss, and his second day on the job, he went To the URL and he couldn't get to the collection, so he called me into his office, and he said, What are you going to do about this? Henry? And I had no I had no idea what to do about it, so I called the main switchboard number at the Library of Congress. And I don't know how this happened, but I got. Transfer to the right person who actually sent me all of our images on an external hard drive, which I thought was kind of amazing, and restored our faith in government at that time, and because otherwise, our backup storage, digital preservation system consisted of copying the images. There were 2000 images, copying them to 2000 CDs, one one CD per image, or one image per CD. Actually, 300 of them didn't fit on CDs, because they were images of large posters, and so they were saved to something called exabyte tape, which within five years, no, no, IT department, no. No one could open those tapes. No one had any idea what they were within five years of that. So that tells you something too. I'm just going to move along to to just sort of a snapshot of our various projects. So the next one we did was in the two it was launched in 2003 and it was done in partnership with NYU. And again, it was fairly small scaled. It was only about 1100 of our items from our Revolutionary War collections funded by IMLS, in partnership with NYU, and again, we were relying on an external partner to archive our images, because we didn't have the infrastructure to do it ourselves. And that's what the site looked like. And it actually still looks like that, because it's actually still live, which is kind of amazing, and this is what one of the items in the collection looked like. So this is not the Mirador viewer. It's you had to double click on that window to look at that volume, and then double click on each image in order to actually look at the page and advance to the next one. And there was no page level metadata. We were just using a mark record for the entire collection. This is a collection of two volumes of individual letters and documents from famous people during the Revolutionary War, like George Washington. No item level cataloging. Very clunky interface. You can try it out yourself. It's still live. We started really getting serious about digitization. At the end of the 2000s around 2010 we had a special appropriation that was arranged to some one of our senators, I believe, and the Library of Congress funneled the money to us. And this, there were goals to this project, which were met with more or less success. One of the main goals was to make digitization part of New York historicals, ongoing activities. So in other words, it was supposed to be to have us treat digitization as one of the library functions that was an ongoing, funded thing, like cataloging, archival processing, reference acquisitions, all of that, also building internal expertise and knowledge and also creating A digitization lab with equipment, and we also were able to digitize 14 important collections having to do with slavery and the slave trade.
Henry Felix Raine 8:30
So all of those were worthwhile goals. We kind of met some of them. We did not really make digitization part of our ongoing activities for reasons which I will explain later, mostly having to do with funding and regarding the digitization of those collections. 10 of the collections were digitized for microfilm because it was cheaper, and by 2020 we realized that the microfilm images were just not good enough, and people's expectations now when they go to a digital collection online is to see images of the originals, not of scratchy microfilm. So we had to get another grant to re digitize those 10 collections, and this is where what the site looked like in our island Dora system that we launched in 2015 I believe. And it's the kind of New York Historical color scheme that we had at the time. Kind of washed out orange and gray, but it worked pretty well. So the next big project was was one that was funded by the Robertson Foundation. And I think the intention of this project was to show that we could do mass digitization in my institution. So they the foundation had us come up with some scenarios. What percentage of our collections could we digitize for X dollar amount? And then they wanted, like three scenarios at three different price points. And I think the highest amount was like 1,000,500 a million dollars, and then $500,000 we ended up getting $500,000 $100,000 a year for five years, and in terms of what percentage of our collections we could digitize with that amount of money, very, very small, because we have vast collections. So the idea of mass digitization in a collection like ours is extremely expensive, and we just haven't done that so. But the great thing about this project is we did digitize, among other things, 35,000 photographs in New York City, which are available in dcmny. This is actually the site as it appeared in New York. Heritage. Content, DM, this is also from the Wayback Machine. And then this is from DCM NY. When DCM NY were you was using islandora. Looks pretty nice, actually. And then this is the site today in dcmny, and the archipelago system. And I think it's, it's one of our more popular collections, and people who come to our site at New York Historical I think certainly appreciate the visual things the most. We have a lot of archival materials, a lot of manuscripts and so on. But I think it's the photographs that really get the most, the most visits another, so we were keenly aware of the need to fund our digitalization efforts and another. I hesitate to call it a scheme, but that's exactly what it was. Was the idea of licensing our collections to commercial publishers to create, uh, products, subscription products, that might eventually generate a revenue stream for the institution. And the idea was that this revenue stream would then be funneled back into support of our digital program, which I'm not sure has actually happened, but eventually we did start receiving checks for like, $48 $112 things like that. It was a lot of effort. Good things about it, and I'll advance to the next slide. It was a way to get a larger amount of materials in our collections digitized.
Henry Felix Raine 12:45
When the contracts end, we will have use of our digital images. They sometimes gave us money for cataloging those collections. They sometimes gave us some money to cover our overhead up front. And then eventually we get money from royalties once they've earned a certain amount of money. But again, those amounts are pretty small so far, and it's not been the big money maker that we all hoped it would be. But the drawback to this approach, of course, is that the collections, and these are some of our best collections, like our Civil War manuscripts, are behind a paywall, so unless you're a subscribing institution, you don't have access to them, unless you come on site to use, to use the online collections in our building, which you can't do right Now because we're closed because of a big renovation project. And then the other issue, which keeps nagging at me is, are we ever going to do anything with all these digital images that were produced, hundreds of 1000s of digital images of our collections which we do have on our servers, we will have the right, or we would have the right to use them at some point. But will we actually do that? Because that costs money too. Just presenting those collections ourselves through our system costs a lot of money. So I like to sort of call it the mirage of digital licensing projects, because I think although it's it's great that we've gotten some of our stuff out there through these projects. It's not been the money maker that we hoped. And again, it's also limiting, limit limiting access to collections that really deserve to be more broadly known. I'll talk briefly about grant funded projects. Almost everything we do is through grant funding, including very generous grants from Metro and other organizations. I've listed the organizations that have given us grants. I didn't list the ones that we didn't get the grants from, but I. There are a couple of others and so, so these, these, these organizations have been very, very generous to us, enabled us to do a lot of things that we couldn't do otherwise. It it's great publicity for the institution to have had NEH grants. However, you always have to sort of find the where the our priorities meet with the funding opportunity. So it's not like we're going to digitize all of them, our manuscripts. We have to find the collection that matches the opportunity and the priorities. It's not always the top priority for us so, so we've had to sort of make some compromises. We also have to deal with some rich people who offer us money to digitize collections that we don't consider maybe to be terribly significant, but we just have to do that. So it's always all about the money the other the other problem with grant funding is, of course, that It's project based, so there's no continuity from project to project. There's no continuity in terms of staff, which is a huge problem, because you lose good people, you lose their expertise and their knowledge. And there's also no continuity in terms of, sometimes in terms of procedures, how we do things, and so on. And recently, one of the main problems is that my institution considers grants they have to pay for themselves now. So the idea of cost share of the institution kicking in money to support a grant that's sort of gone out the window lately, which is a big, big problem, because you can get 350,000 or you could get $350,000 from any age, but that was never enough to cover the whole cost of the project. So that limits us as well. So anyway, I'll finish now, because I know I'm running out of time. My main point is, cost of digitization has decreased a lot. The size of the projects has certainly increased. We've had, I mean, we had an NEH where we had 675,000 images from from microfilm of time, life correspondent cables reporting from Time Life. So that's the scale of project that we might do now, certainly in the 10s of 1000s of images, sometimes in the 100 1000s. And just a lot of questions that come up
Henry Felix Raine 17:36
having to do with digital preservation, the cost of doing that, open source systems which sound free, but they're not, as we all know, because you end up having to pay people to actually build your open source system. And also this, this need for internal IT support and expertise, which which also implies staffing and cost. So these are just questions I'm throwing out there, but I still don't have the answers to the main question, which is, how, how do we make our projects sustainable? How do we make our digital program sustainable? And so I'll leave you with that, and thank you for your attention. Applause.
Announcer 18:26
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