A giant leap for East Hampton Town history and those interested in it happens Thursday with the unveiling of a new East Hampton Library Long Island Collection research system.
Visitors to the virtual collection will find an interactive experience with improved access to a broad and growing body of content. By itself, the homepage's search field could keep visitors occupied and entertained, but the website now features an additional 23 collections, including the town and East Hampton Village's historic records, a local artists research archive, the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor, high school yearbooks dating to the 1950s, the Ladies Village Improvement Society, the Bruce Collins Photo Archive, a maritime folklife collection, and the Home, Sweet Home Museum archive, all available to browse through and search.
The East Hampton Library is the first public library to employ the system, called TIND, which integrates research-data management, digital preservation, and library software. It is in use at the United Nations, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and at colleges and universities in multiple countries.
“I think this is one of the most important projects this library has been involved with,” Dennis Fabiszak, the library's executive director, said on Monday. “It is equal to building a new wing on the building. It’s not only that we’ve taken everything that we’ve already digitized and put it into this new system. We’ve set it up in a way that we can continue to add to it. We can have other local institutions add their own materials at some point, with our catalogers being able to review it and enhance the information.”
The site, at digitallongisland.org, has been close to two years in the making, between selecting a new system and migrating digitized content to it, Mr. Fabiszak said. “It’s really put together in a way that is focused on the user and having the best experience.”
It was very time consuming for library staff to add material to its previous system. “The new one will enable us to put a lot more material online a lot quicker,” he said. “Minutes after we put it online, it’s indexed and available for the public.”
The system is dynamic, adaptive, and “much more user-friendly than anything I’ve seen,” said Andrea Meyer, who heads the library’s Long Island Collection. “You can really narrow down exactly what you want, instead of having to go through hundreds of pages of things.” As the first library to employ the system, “some of our time has been spent adapting what has been used by the U.N. and universities, really large-scale organizations, where there’s a lot of unpublished work.”
Mr. Fabiszak described several components and abilities of the system. “We can put individual rights on individual documents,” he said, maintaining specific rights for an image’s photographer, for example, “something we were never able to do in previous systems, which we hope will also enable us to get more materials from people who have been hesitant in the past.” Searching a yearbook, users can enter a name and see the pages on which the subject is depicted.
“Last weekend, we integrated all the artist files from Guild Hall,” he said, “so we now have more than 21,000 records in this system. It’s making it a significant collection, and I think there are things in there for everybody.”
“And a group that really knows the history, like the L.V.I.S. or the Sag Harbor Presbyterian Church, can actually write in their own history and augment what we know,” Ms. Meyer said. “We try to know a lot of it, but there are limits. We weren’t there in 1958, but there are people in town that really do know that, and it’s great to have that.”
Residents of East Hampton, she said, “have prioritized history in a way that many other communities don’t.”
“The reach that the collection will have will be amazing,” Mr. Fabiszak said. “We will eventually index the entire thing, so anybody in the world, even doing a Google search, if they’ve never heard of East Hampton, will still find their way into this collection and this material. It’s wonderful that we’re able to do this.”
