In 2002, the City Council established the Archival Review Board.  The new five-member board was directed to “…render annually to the mayor a report reviewing the archival processing of any city papers.” Authored by Municipal Archives Director Sylvia Kollar, the recently published FY 2020 ARB Report, is an informative, beautifully-illustrated narrative describing the many accomplishments of the City’s archival program during a difficult year.

Highlights of the Report:

Ms. Kollar details the successes of her team in 2020. Archivists transferred more than 9,000 WNYC audio tape recordings from the New York Public Library to the Municipal Archives. When the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas suffered a devastating fire in early 2020, conservators and archivists volunteered their expertise and person-power to assist in the recovery. Three grant-funded projects took place during the year. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported an assessment of the HVAC system and storage environment at 31 Chambers Street in preparation for a second grant that will implement the needed upgrades. Conservators re-housed and repaired 218 oversize architectural drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park with grant funding from the New York State Library. And the New York State Archives’ Local Government Records Management Fund supported digitation of more than 150 hours of deteriorating WNYC motion picture film; this work continues into fiscal 2021. The team preparing archival collections for the move to the new facility in Industry City cleaned and re-boxed 25,000 cubic feet of material.

The report further describes the remarkable work that the Archives staff managed to accomplish after March 2020 when the facility closed and they conducted their work remotely. The archivists edited and migrated more than 3,700 individual accession records to the web-based ArchivesSpace application that will provide access to descriptive information about the holdings. With a launch slated for Spring 2021, this tool will serve as the portal for researchers to browse across collections by subject, people, and places. Archives staff also commenced nine transcription projects entering data from hand-written inventories and digitized records into searchable databases. Researchers will benefit greatly from new access to several photograph and mayoral collections as well as indexes to records of particular interest to family historian, the ‘Bodies-in-Transit’ series and early census records.

Please take a few minutes to read the ARB 2020 report and look for updates on these and other projects in future blogs.