Welcome to Urban Archive!
Each week we hope to discuss new topics that arise during the development of the Urban Archive platform. But, before we get into the weekly updates, let us tell you a little bit about what Urban Archive is.
Urban Archive is a free, location-based app that brings together the digital collections of museums, archives, and libraries so that the public can learn about and engage with history where it happened. We’re a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit whose aim is to share the history of New York with its citizens and visitors.
Many institutions have collection portals online where you can view and search their digital assets (photographs, maps, artifacts, etc). While these portals are an amazing tool for researchers, many digital collections are hard to navigate and often underutilized by the general public. Urban Archive is geolocating the digital assets of various institutions and combining them into one mobile platform.
New York City has thousands of historic locations, each with its own story. By connecting archived material to its original location, we are giving our users the ability to experience history where it happened.
