New York Public Library’s Digital Resources Are Now Free For Everyone

New York Public Library’s Digital Resources Are Now Free For Everyone

by Ashley McCann 

The most authentic learning evolves from experience; it involves engagement instead of just listening and ideally encourages curiosity and further inquiry. It’s one thing to teach history from a book — and books are indeed a fantastic tool for doing so — but quite another to engage senses, emotion, and imagination in a more memorable and potentially impactful way.

See also: 25 Of The Most Important Books About Racism & Being Black In America

The New York Public Library has made it a little easier to bring an interactive historical experience to the classroom by making their out-of-copyright resources available for high resolution download — a digital archive of 708,516 documents and images, and growing. They’ve also streamlined the process of sifting through this historical treasure trove with several intuitive search options including a visual viewer that allows you to sort by century, genre, collection or color.

Even more compelling, the NYPL Labs team has provided some innovative opportunities for exploring certain collections, like a game that allows you to walk through floor plans of turn-of-the-century real estate, compare and contrast New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1911 and 2015, or plan a trip using travel guides from 1936 to 1966 that featured places black travelers were welcome. The sheer volume of historical material available promises a wide variety of interesting options for research.

Read more and consider new and unique ways to encourage your students to dig into history.

Free For All: New York Public Library’s Digital Resources; New York Public Library’s Digital Resources Are Now Free For Everyone