New York Public Library is a rich source of digital resources, both text and images. This is especially interesting because they have done an excellent job in making connections from the library catalog (CATNYP) to digitized resources.

Because NYPL is an active participant in Google Books, their recent text digitization efforts seem to have gone into this. They’ve done a good job of making links from CATNYP to the books from their collection that have been digitized for Google Books.

A searchable list of all NYPL’s Google Books in CATNYP (32000 titles) is here ….
catnyp.nypl.org/search/XGoogle+Books+Library+Project

To search a subset of this, add a keyword, either in the address bar directly …
catnyp.nypl.org/search/XGoogle+Books+Library+Project+botany
… or add a keyword in the search box.

It’s helpful to have this easy access to NYPL books that are in Google Books through CATNYP, but it’s surprising that the CATNYP record gives no information indicating the print version from which the Google Books version has been digitized. Here’s an example of a book title found in CATNYP, with separate entries for the Google Books and print versions, with neither record linking to the other.

While NYPL’s book digitization efforts seem to be concentrated in Google Books, they continue to do their own image digitization work. As with Google Books, they do a nice job of making links in CATNYP, from the catalog records of books from which they’ve digitized images to the images in the Digital Gallery. The screen-shots below show an example :

This shows links between the CATNYP record for the book American medical botany to the images from the book in the NYPL Digital Gallery.

I see on pages in the Digital Gallery that they’re working on a “new look” for Gallery pages. Here’s the new look for Gallery pages for American medical botany. It’s an improvement in many ways, more streamlined, but doesn’t seem to have a link back to the record for the book in CATNYP.

From the Digital Gallery IT Architecture and Delivery : “Runs on an open, extensible architecture … managed through an Oracle database … ColdFusion software provides the application programming interface that integrates metadata and images for web delivery…”