About The NYPL Digital Picture Collection

The New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection was created in 1914 to meet the needs of New York's large cultural community— artists, illustrators, and designers, as well as the general public— who required access to images classified by subject rather than by artist or origin.

These pictures, arranged in approximately 12,000 categories, provided inspiration and visual information for a broad range of endeavors— commercial art, mass market publishing, advertising, fashion design, film, theater, and popular entertainment. Before the existence of photocopy machines, it was particularly important that these pictures could be checked out like books and taken to a studio, workplace, or home.

Under the leadership of Romana Javitz (1929-1968), the collection evolved into a world-famous repository for image research by subject. The open files became an almost unique visual index for pictures in and out of copyright. Despite the availability today of photocopiers, digital cameras, and the Internet, the physical collection is probably more used than ever before: more than 360,000 pictures were checked out in 2001, with at least several million more physically examined at the Library.

Comprised largely of illustrations clipped from books, calendars, and magazines, it is a fluid repository, to which more than 60,000 images are added yearly. These additions reflect the shifting nature of popular culture, trends, and visual documentation of what will become the past. More »