- The New York Public Library is one of the great
public institutions of the world.
For 125 years, we have served the public,
we have taken and helped steward the collected
cultural heritage of New York, of the nation of the world.
- The library has not just books, it has newspapers,
it has magazines, we have photographs, we have prints.
- This is one of the only 11 known copies
of the Bay Psalm Book, which is the first surviving work
printed in British North America,
- We have more information available
to us than could ever be imagined years ago.
We are currently at a moment of total transformation,
the agent of change is digitization.
What the cloud enables us to do is make materials available
to thousands and thousands of people simultaneously.
- Cloud Storage is effectively forever.
The things that are put in the cloud now,
they're gonna be maintained across generations
across technology changes.
- The scale of the library's task
is a fairly absurd one.
And that makes this the most exciting moment
in the history of the New York Public Library.
- It's interesting to compare digital versus print,
when you think about it, the book is one of the greatest
technologies that we've ever had.
And so it's a very intuitive way of
connecting with information.
Books take up room, you have to store them,
but they last a very long time in the right condition.
What makes moving them online wonderful is that you have
people approaching it, who don't necessarily think
of themselves as scholars.
And so you have them approaching the library's
collections in new ways.
- Being married to a chef.
- Sometimes is easy.
- Being married is a lot.
- When she arrive in the kitchen cooking,
she's like, "Let me see, let me see what you're doing."
- We have four restaurants in Greenwich Village.
So we're in the process of developing
a restaurant to open mid 2020.
And it's taking its influence from early American cuisine.
Whether it's shaker design and furniture or philosophies.
- It's about the experience.
- Instead of this kind of clock, we go for
a shaker hanging clock, that can be great--
- All the restaurants begin with a lot of research,
we think of the design and the menu,
and the neighborhood and the whole thing,
the whole bones of the project.
We found a great source of inspiration through
the public library to learn about graphics
to learn about the ingredients, language,
just searching out information that you don't know
what you're gonna find sometimes.
- These are menus from the library's menu collection,
which has about 55,000 or so restaurant menus in it.
It is the largest collection of
restaurant menus in the world.
We've digitized them and then made them available
through this website called, What's on the menu?
- You can sort through it by dish,
by name of the restaurant,
by year or periods, it's like having a library
in your house all the time.
- To go to the library, not all the time, you'll have time,
so you go online and search online.
- With what's on the menu, you can actually do research
on a granular level that you can't really do
if you just approach the physical menus themselves.
- On menu presents a lot of different things
that we're gonna use when we're putting together a project.
We'll read and we'll read and we'll go through
four different renditions and we'll say
hmm, commonalities, proportions.
- When you look at a lot of these old menus,
the term for avocado was actually called alligator pear.
And if you look for alligator pear,
you'll see it appearing on many, many menus.
You don't necessarily know it's avocado unless you do
a little bit more digging.
Sometimes you actually use these menus to connect
to other things that then give you more information.
But that's one example.
- Today we're making an Oxtail Soup.
We're following along these older recipes.
Everything here is really ordinary in a special way,
and that's very striking, so it has to be really fresh
and has to be done really well.
- Every librarian likes to hear that their collections
are being used, period.
Whether it's a high school student writing a paper,
or it's two chefs in New York, using our collection
to inform new projects.
- The hardest thing to do sometimes is to help a person
find what they're looking for.
So we have to generate sufficient metadata
that is highly descriptive.
- You never know what's gonna be the thing that reveals
something interesting about the
subject matter until you do it.
So by lowering the cost and the time to create,
and experiment, and to innovate, AWS, gives the library
this new capability that they didn't have before.
- A research question now can be running a query
across millions of pieces of information simultaneously.
You can now answer questions that used to require you
traveling hours to go to a certain place
and look at a certain book.
That book might now be accessible in your pocket
through a simple like search online.
The biggest challenge the New York Public Library faces
in doing this is truly one of scale.
We have millions upon millions upon millions of things
that we have digitized or want to digitize.
Could be sort of anything that was ever created
by an electronic device that helps tell the story
of someone whose collection we're taking on.
- A lot of different aspects of the cloud
come into play here.
Being able to launch compute instances,
being able to use auto scaling,
being able to use load balancing to evenly apportion
the load across them.
All those parts work together to make scalability happen.
- You get 40 boxes, and this is one of the devices
in one of the boxes, somebody finds it and says,
"Hey, there might be interesting material
on something like this.
If you look on the back, none of those ports are something
that you can connect to at this point in time.
Generally, that means taking something like this apart.
- The challenge with a collection of this scale is not just
responding to what people want at the moment,
it's predicting what people might want in the future.
It's also prioritizing those items that might
not last until that future.
- Whether it's Floppies, Zip disks,
CDs, VHS tapes, DVD RAMs.
They we're never really meant to last for decades
or centuries, so part of what we've done through our
digitization and our born digital preservation efforts,
is to migrate that information, from its original format
into something else that we can access, to the cloud.
- Digitally, we are currently at five petabytes
and rapidly growing.
- Five petabytes, that's a lot of data.
The camera in your phone, you could take 57 pictures
every second for 100 years to fill up five petabytes.
Once you've got five petabytes of data,
that's just your starting point.
And what we see in the future is having that much
information sort of multiplied at a scale
that is even more unimaginable.
- You don't just set up three petabytes or four petabytes
of material on a server somewhere
and say, "I hope it works."
- A really important aspect of doing long term
digital storage is making sure that your data
isn't being quietly corrupted along the way.
The cloud takes care of that for you automatically.
- Whether you want to do you know machine learning
on our AV collections, or you want to emulate
an old operating system, you wanna make sure that we keep
all of those options available.
- The New York Public Library is not just a sort of
be a trove of things that happened in the past,
but to be sort of this living, bubbling cauldron of stuff
that is inspiring new stuff that is being made.
- Whether it's online, or we get to go into the library,
information is alive, it keeps feeding you
and you grow and you know--
- You absorb more information than actually
you we're looking for.
- You're gonna come away with a lot more
inspiration or just curiosity.
Not bad. (both laugh)
- It almost sounds funny, but when you're using
cloud storage, the sky is literally the limit.
- When I think of the future
of New York Public Library,
I think of a great public institution that still has
important physical spaces that are a center for many
but an online version of itself that is
equivalent in size and stature.
And we will continue to add to those collections
until time ends so that we can remember
our past and create our future.