NYC online archive crashes on opening

New York City’s Department of Records announced that they had digitized and uploaded 870,000 of the best photographs out of the 2,200,000 kept in the city’s Municipal Archives. The pictures date from the mid-1800s onward and document every aspect of city governance. Only a few of them have been published before. The Department has been working for four years to make them available to the public. Although the entire archive hasn’t been uploaded at this point because they’re on a tight technological and funding budget, the department will continue to add new content to the online database.Those technological limitations became immediately obvious when the day after the database opened, it crashed. The interest was massive and came from all over the world, which meant that the server never caught a break. It was down for weeks before they finally got their act together. Now the site is stable again and therefore finally bloggable.

Source: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/17031

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