On October 25, 2021, the New York City Municipal Archives launched ArchivesSpace, a web-based tool that enables researchers to easily identify records pertaining to people, places, and subjects in the collections. Put succinctly, this is a very big deal!
Opening Page. Municipal Archives Collection Guides. NYC Municipal Archives.
The Municipal Archives has been described as one of the largest repositories of government records in North America. The world-class collections span four centuries and include historical records of all three branches of municipal government—executive, legislative, and judicial. The Municipal Archives holdings total more than 185,000 cubic feet and 350 terabytes of historical City records, photographs, and recordings. That’s the good news. The on-going challenge is how to provide various levels of access to help patrons know what exists in the collections and identify materials relevant for their research. ArchivesSpace takes us a long-way toward meeting that challenge.
Before implementation of this tool, patrons needed to know, or guess, which collections might contain material relevant to their research. Then, it would be necessary to examine available inventories, etc., individually. Even with Archives staff assistance, it was not always possible to identify every collection that might be pertinent.
Now, users can search and browse descriptions of the archival holdings using a variety of parameters—keyword, creator agency, subject and name. Search results will also indicate when digitized material is available in the online gallery.
Launching ArchivesSpace didn’t take quite the resources needed for a moon landing, but at times, it felt like it. To make it work, we had to gain intellectual and physical control over the collections, establish record groups, clean up legacy data, and identify record creators and their functional relationships to one another. Essentially, we had to remediate and standardize vast quantities of metadata—an immense task given size and complexity of the collections.
Illustration - Collection Data Sources. NYC Municipal Archives.
City archivists have been describing municipal government records since the establishment of the Municipal Archives in 1952. There are more than 3,800 appraisal and accession reports, plus thousands of inventories, indexes and finding aids in many formats—paper, Excel, Access and pdf. Often there are multiple versions describing a collection.
We began the work in 2014. First, we assembled all 3,812 accession records. They were very useful, of course, but we discovered that over the 70+years of their creation, consistent descriptive standards had not been used. Here’s an example: “Parks Department” is listed on a 2010 accession. Unfortunately, “Parks Department” is not the name of the agency, past or present. Depending on the time period, the creating agency could have been:
• Board of the Commissioners of the Central Park (1857-1870)
• Department of Public Parks (1870-1898)
• Department of Parks (1898-1968)
• Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs (1968-1976)
• Department of Parks and Recreation (1976-present).
There were incomplete appraisal and accession records for some of the holdings, particularly those dating from lean budget years when there was only enough Archives staff to bring important records into the building, but not to describe or inventory the material.
We also found that names of city officials and their titles had been spelled and listed in a myriad of ways. For example, is it Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia or Mayor Fiorello La Guardia? In total there are more than 1,800 “agents” in the collection, i.e. people, places, entities, etc. Only 900 had Library of Congress-established designations—the rest we had to create.
An indispensable resource: The Guide to the Municipal Government of the City of New York, by Thelma E. Smith, 1960. NYC Municipal Library
We had to develop an ontology, i.e. figure out who are the record creators and what is their relationship to one another. Researching and creating these agency histories proved to be one of the most time-consuming but important tasks we accomplished.
Illustration: Sample Record Group: Commission on Human Rights. NYC Municipal Archives
We also created record groups. They are the “buckets” to index functionality, not the records themselves. We decided to use the current agencies as the record groups; they are like umbrellas with the names of all the other related agencies listed underneath them. For example, if a researcher does not know that there was a previous iteration of the agency with a different title, they can search in the tool to learn all the other associated and predecessor entities, and relevant holdings in the Archives.
The ultimate goal of implementing ArchivesSpace is to make the entirety of the collections open and accessible to researchers. It also serves as a tool for Archives staff to manage the material. It is worth noting that in some ways the pandemic and resulting closure of the Municipal Archives offices helped speed up the implementation. Much of the work that was required to make ArchivesSpace a reality was suitable for staff working remotely.
In launching ArchivesSpace, Municipal Archives Director Sylvia Kollar said: “The Archives has reimagined ways in which we provide access to the City's historical records. The site enables researchers to understand the constant evolution of City government agencies, and reflects the Archives’ role in providing intellectual access points to a dynamic, ever- growing collection.”
Take a moment to explore our NYCMA Collection Guides. We look forward to helping explore the wide range of New York City government collections.
Users can submit research requests directly to Municipal Archives reference staff using the Contact Us tab or email research@records.nyc.gov.
Alexandra Hilton is Head of Collections Management at the Municipal Archives. She joined the Archives 2012 and has been working on ArchivesSpace since 2014.
