2021: It’s Been a Year!

And just like that, another year here at Urban Archive is coming to a close! While we have tons to be excited about in the coming months, we are also so proud of the progress we’ve made this past year in making archives more accessible with our partners and community. Now before we jump into all that we have in store for 2022, we invite you to join us as we reflect on some of our favorite moments from the past twelve months. Enjoy!

Urban Archive By The Numbers 📈

• 167,511 users
• 110,046 images mapped
• 1,082 stories
• 121 partners
• 6 cities

Most Popular Content 🔥

• East Village Mafia by Thomas F. Comiskey
• 1879: The Goelet Mansion and the Last Farm on Broadway by Peggy Gavan
• The History of Jews in New York by Neighborhood by Museum at Eldridge Street

New Milestones ✔️

• Opened up a whole new world of opportunities by integrating audio assets onto the map, making it possible to experience audio stories and oral histories in-situ.
• Released never-before-seen images from The New York City Department of Environmental Protection, including these ones dubbed “boring”.
• Surpassed 100+ partners in NYC alone, bringing on new organizations like the Seamen’s Church Institute and The New York Landmarks Conservancy and mapping their amazing collections.

Projects We’re Proud Of 👊

• Brooklyn Resists tells the long history of Black protest and resistance in the borough. Our crowdsourcing tools helped the team at the Center for Brooklyn History preserve these stories and bring them to life on an evergreen digital map.
• Queens Public Library turned 125 and ran a “birthday” project on Urban Archive all year long! In total, we collected more than 700 images that provide insight into the history of the 63 library branches across the borough.
• After running a series of crowdsourcing initiatives like New York Loves Moms (and Dads!), we brought the photos we collected from our community to city streets with the help of LinkNYC. See the Back to School pix that made the cut here!

Fancy New Tech ✨

• We made sharing off-platform easy with the Urban Archive Widget, which makes it possible for organizations to surface content from our app onto other sites.
• Since rolling out user accounts, we’ve been busy iterating based on our community’s feedback… and made it possible for users to customize their profile page!
• Partners can seamlessly add new assets to the map, images, and audio files alike, with our direct-uploader.

Other Great Stuff 💪

• Gap-year students at the Living City Project created a series of educational content on Urban Archive, as well as our friends at the Museum at Eldridge Street! One of our favorites is by Leila Tinin on The Harlem Renaissance through Music, Art, Photography, and Poetry.
• With the release of user accounts, we started experimenting with collecting and mapping stories from our community. We amassed over 1,070 images in an effort to make archives more social in just 2021 alone!
• We spoke at The Best Heritage IMAGINES Conference and stepped in for some college classes at Pratt and NYU to talk about digital archives.

What’s Next 👀

• We’ll be exploring ways to further blend IRL experiences with the digital.
• If you subscribe to Archive Weekly, you probably heard that we’re headed to Europe!
• We’re gearing up for some big partner projects that will allow us to ramp up feature development and streamline workflows for accessing analytics, managing assets, and content creation.