NYPL Labs: Hacking the Library

ABSTRACT Over the past couple of years, The New York Public Library has made significant strides in jumpstarting a digital humanities research program through the establishment of a curator-focused, R&D technology unit called NYPL Labs. This article will examine the first three projects produced by NYPL Labs, a trilogy of online experiments exploring methods of mining new humanities data sets from special collections material, and of translating the Library's public mission to the Web via user collaboration and crowdsourcing. In just two years, NYPL Labs has demonstrated how much can be accomplished when technical resources are focused and procedural constraints loosened, though the challenges of sustaining this work are already becoming apparent as the team must continue to innovate while maintaining a growing portfolio of projects.