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Throughout the pandemic, Library staff have been busy working remotely. Here are some of the projects we have been involved in:
- Adding cataloging information for articles in journals, proceedings, reports, etc. Having a more complete citation for these materials will help the staff in locating them and the researcher in discovering even more focused information on their topic.
- Improvements to the Government Publications Portal, detailed in a separate article.
- Adding the holdings of Library materials located in the DORIS offsite storage facility, so they can be more easily located.
- Increasing the volume of Mayor’s Press Releases dating back to 2014 accessible in electronic format by adding them to the government publications portal.
Whenever the Library reopens, we are sure our researchers will benefit from these endeavors. In the meantime, please contact both Library and Archives with any research questions at research@records.nyc.gov.
We’re Looking on the Bright Side
by Julia Robbins, Deputy Librarian, Municipal Library
The pandemic is giving us time and opportunity to concentrate our efforts toward improving the Municipal Library’s digital resources: the electronic library catalog that describes our extensive collection of historical New York City government publications, and the Government Publications Portal (GPP), which holds all New York City agency digital publications that are required (and many that are not). Both take detailed efforts to assure that our materials are searchable online in the easiest possible way.
In our GPP, we have been continually improving the accuracy of the Required Report List for each agency to ensure that the City Council-required notices of late publication are correct.
With help from an able recent library school graduate, we have been updating broken links in our catalog. We are making sure that catalog call numbers for paper resources in our electronic catalog also link, where possible, to digital copies of those resources in the GPP. We also have been updating the catalog to include more subjects relevant to each publication to help researchers to find related materials they might not have thought to search for.
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Photo from the Works Progress Administration collection at the Municipal Archives and design by Aburaihan Rahman
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