“The City of New York is finally catching up with over two centuries of neglect in the care of its records.” Thus began an October 1953 article in the American Archivist touting the 1952 creation of the New York City Municipal Archives and its integration into a records management program. At the time, the Municipal Archives and Records Center was housed in the Rhinelander Building, and the Municipal Reference Library was still a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). As of December 1952, the Archives had an estimated 12,000 cubic feet of material, and “no standard storage or filing material.” The collection has grown significantly since then, by more than a factor of ten, and as the diversity of its collections has grown, the limitations of standard storage shelves has made preservation difficult.

This past January we described the construction of the Municipal Archives’ new off-site storage space in Industry City. A lot has happened to the world since then. However, we are happy to report that after a shutdown of several months, the project continues. We have had to adjust the schedule due to COVID-19 and, like a lot of construction projects, supply chain issues are still creating delays. But, our new custom shelving is going up, HVAC equipment is installed, and we are starting to see the shape of what will be.

In 1953 the Municipal Archives and Records Center installed a state-of-the-art microfilm laboratory. Now, almost 70-years later, we are building a state-of-the-art digitization lab in the new space, with workstations for digitizing motion picture films, magnetic video tapes, still film, and flat art. New high-speed scanners that are gentle on archival materials will allow the mass digitization of paper records.

In 1953 it was reported that “As yet relatively little reference use has been made of the archives. Reference services in 1952 averaged about 35 a month. Chairs and tables are available for use by researchers, but the supervisor has not as yet felt sufficiently prepared to cope with a heavy reference load and thus has not publicized the collection very much.” While the new Industry City space will have chairs and tables for researchers, our digitization programs have allowed us to reach far more researchers through our online portals than could ever visit our offices. An average of 740 people a day are visiting our nyc.gov site. Over the last several years the Archives has provided reference service to more than 50,000 patrons annually and the on-line gallery had over 200,000 users last year.

Not much had changed since 1952 for the “Typed guides and inventories… available as finding aids to help researchers,” but over the past few years archivists have been inputting all those inventories into ArchivesSpace, work that they were able to continue remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new integrated access portal now under way will allow researchers to search across all Library and Archives collections.

A new cold storage room will house the photographic and magnetic tape collections of the Municipal Archives, including thousands of original WNYC broadcast tapes recently accessioned from the NYPL.

By early next year, we will have moved 140,000 cubic feet of New York City government’s historical records into this new space, including mayoral records, maps, photographs, ledgers and other documents. These records will be available to researchers onsite instead of being trucked to Manhattan, thus making a contribution to a greener City. Seventy years hence there undoubtedly will be different preservation and storage solutions for the born-digital records of today’s government. But the foundational documents at our Industry City location will be safe, secure, and available.

Source: Jason Horn, Municipal Archives and Records Center of the City of New York, American Archivist, volume 16, issue 4, 1953: https://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.16.4.h1335164g7567424