For weeks now the City of New York had a public link that not many knew about. Now the New York city Municipal Archives site is officially open online. Sort of. It’s down now.
With 870,000 plus images available — and tons of pent up demand — looks like the site just couldn’t handle the load.
For a while now, the Municipal Archives has been busy scanning images, maps and even converting audio recordings that go back almost 100 years into digital form. But once news of the public New York Municipal Archive link hit the Internet today, the traffic went crazy, officials said. At this writing, the site was still down with the error message shown above.
Once it’s back up, the site should make money, though. It lets you buy prints of many of the photos there and even license the right to use them. It’s cool.
The rules: Order a print for home use and and gifts, but no commercial usage allowed. There are special licensing terms for commercial usage. But you need to apply with a special archive form found at the bottom of the order page.
If you’re in NYC, visit the archives in person. You will need a valid ID and pass security checks to gain access to this public city building.
For aNewDomain.net, I’m Chris Miller.
