Digitized Materials in the NYPL's Digital Collections
About 25,000 images from Slavic and East European holdings held by various NYPL divisions have been digitized and are available in the NYPL's Digital Collections (see the checklist attached below). The two largest groupings of these images are called Icons and Images of Cultures: Plate Books from the Russian Empire, Early Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe, 1730-1935, and Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, 1860-1945. It must be emphasized that the content of these albums is not strictly East European. A large number of the volumes digitized here were produced within the borders of the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, but concern places and subjects that are neither geographically nor ethnically Slavic or East European. For example, there are plate books concerning pre-Classical, Classical (Greek and Roman), Byzantine, Islamic, and Asian civilizations. There is, for example, a richly illustrated album devoted to Byzantine and Georgian ornaments and architecture as well as illustrated 19th-century travel account of the Ionian islands, Greece, and Turkey.
Some of the titles included in the two collections mentioned above are listed in this guide under different categories. These categories also include sample holdings of other visual materials not included in the two large collections. In some cases all content was digitized from a particular book, but in other instances a smaller group of pages or even just one. In addition to images from publications entirely devoted to Slavic and East European topics, the NYPL's Digital Collections also offer images dealing with Slavic and East European topics which were digitized from materials devoted to broader topics. For example, the illuminated manuscript Chronicle of the Council of Constance (1460) depicts the execution of Jan Hus and the arrest of Jeroným Pražský while New York World's Fair 1939 and 1940 Incorporated records include digitized images about the participation of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.
