Over 275,000 valuable images & free access..

Over 275,000 valuable images & free access..

New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Gallery has launched free access to their 275,000+ digitised photos. While browsing this amazing collection, curiosity took me to the section of Indian pictures. They are mesmerizing and amazing both in quality & naming convention,which is very intact.

I wonder about the challenging task in indexing such a huge voume of image bank. They obviously call it: 4 years of hard work is put into this mammoth work. Naming or indexing is very important task which facilitates each image to attract search spiders. I still remember the hard ship of similar task. While working in a webhosting company way back, the team which was vested with the responsibility of indexing thousand plus stock images, were literally struggling to attatch meta tag to each & every image, which went unsuccessful at last ! ;)

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NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

The technical team that built the software, briefly describes how the publishing system uses XML to ensure fast public delivery.
They say: "the Digital Asset Management System is a homegrown labor of love with an Oracle back-end and ColdFusion web-based front-end. The publishing system is based on an extract from Oracle that is delivered via XML. This allowed us to have a heavily normalized repository database and a rather flat and fast public delivery. More on the use of XML later."
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