Thursday, March 10, 2005

It's All About Images

New York Public Library has just launched its Digital Galley, "275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library". This enormous institution has a lot of treasures, and they've decided to share. The work is still in progress, their goal is half a million digital images.
      Resource Shelf is featuring the NYPL Digital Gallery this week, and walks you through an exploration of the site. Editor Shirl Kennedy invites us to remember "the first digital images you ever saw online." Oh yes. It was July of 1994 and Comet Shoemaker-Levy was crashing into Jupiter. We had to download those pictures one-by-one ever-so-slowly by ftp through our 2400 baud modem but oh what a knockout on the screen... Memory lane: Shoemaker-Levy on its way in, already fragmented in May of 1994; and, "a necklace of impact sites", July 25, 1994.
      Belated thanks to the guys who invented Mosaic...

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