Physical or digital archives are historical ‘memoirs’ of sorts. They are factual narratives that chronicle or document a specific time period, event, or theme. If you’ve ever sought out information on a particular topic, image, person, or event by searching for (or ‘googling’) it on the internet, the abundance of material that pops up on the screen can be astonishing in its scope and its depth, especially when researching a more obscure subject or lesser known history.
How it physically gets up there on the computer or phone screen is a whole other story, and I can say from personal experience that it is not automatically initiated or input on the World Wide Web mechanically or via AI, but rather by the physical strokes of a person’s fingers on a keyboard into a digital collection management system that allows libraries and other organizations to build, showcase, and preserve digital collections on their own websites. These management systems are tools for storing, organizing, and uploading digital items along with metadata to describe each item, making them more discoverable to people, researchers, authors, historians, educators, and more around the world. Before the images actually appear on a digital platform, A LOT of highly detailed work precedes them!
Back in 2017, when I worked as the collections manager of the archive at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, the museum’s curator, Josh Stoff, asked me to develop and implement an online digital archive of the museum’s impressive photo archive of prints and negatives numbering in the tens of thousands. These items document Long Island’s extraordinary aviation and history from the first flights on the Hempstead Plains in 1909 to the Golden Age of Flight, the Jet Age, man’s first steps on the Moon, and all that occurred in the development of aviation and airports on Long Island in between.
At first, it seemed like a daunting project for one person to carry forward, but because of the dedication of one volunteer named Joel, with a boundless passion for aviation history and for preserving it, he and I took on the task and were able to successfully tackle this enormous project.
After the Cradle of Aviation Museum became a member of the non-profit Long Island Library Resources Council (lilrc.org) and with the assistance of the LILRC’s Digitization and Archives Coordinator, the Cradle’s digital archive was launched. Today, over the course of eight years, this archive is comprised of over 41,000 images (and counting) featuring everything aviation on Long Island, the people, the airplanes, the airfields and airports (which geographically includes Queens and Brooklyn), and can be viewed on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website.
Please take a look at this amazing collection of aviation images!
