More Than a Century of Data on Brooklyn Life to Be Digitized

One of New York’s oldest continuously published newspapers, The City Record, is going digital, giving residents a view into city affairs going back more than a century. The publication, founded in 1873 by reformers promoting greater municipal transparency, is a city-penned paper for city administrators and serves as the official journal of New York City.

Its pages include meeting minutes of the City Council, public notices, contract awards for city infrastructure, changes of personnel, the outcome of lawsuits against the city, weekly reports on health, notices of public hearings and auctions, changes in agency rules (such as the first traffic code for cars at the dawn of the 20th century), citizen complaints, various requests by city institutions, and the like.

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering has been awarded a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize the paper and its rich data on politics, real estate, employment and society. The Record has already been partially digitized, and at NYC.gov you can already search a large data portal of notices published throughout the years.

The completed archive should be a treasure trove for those looking to research anything from financial development to family history to infrastructure and beyond in Brooklyn after it merged with Manhattan in 1898.

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