Some say as many as one in seven Americans have family roots in Brooklyn, and I expect the newly digitized Brooklyn city directories now available through the Internet Archive will get heavy use from genealogists, historians, authors, journalists, students, and even artists to trace connections to the diverse and ever-changing borough.
Title page, Spooner’s Brooklyn Directory 1822. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
What is now the Center for Brooklyn History first joined the Internet Archive’s Community Websprogram in 2017 as part of the original cohort. This program gave us the tools and training we needed to save over 2TB of web-based Brooklyn history content, including over 1,000 individual URLs. We also host our digitized high school newspapers and audiovisual material on the Internet Archive.
In addition to helping us preserve this web-based content, Community Webs has now also made it possible to increase access to our physical collections through digitization. As part of the Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections project, made possible by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we were able to partner with the Internet Archive to digitize 236 microfiche sheets of Brooklyn city directories.
You can read more in an article by Anna Trammell published in the Internet Archive Blogs at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/13411081