In a moving black-and-white image, the original Tony and Maria from “West Side Story” bound across Central Park and into the 21st Century.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts recently digitized negatives from the 1957 Broadway production of “West Side Story” and turned the stills into GIFs. Libraries across the country are increasingly making GIFs to expand access and usage of their collections and put a spotlight on their resources. “A fair amount of work in academic libraries is drawing attention to the collections,” said Trevor Owens, a supervisory senior program officer at the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
More than 80% of libraries with special collections said that digitizing them was “critical” to their library’s future, a 2013 study from the Association of Research Libraries and Ithaka S+R, a non-profit research service, found. Critically, a library’s ability to bring in more users and donors led to the collections’ ability to attract future funding needed to sustain and grow the collections, a later study of eight institutions with digitized special collections concluded.
GIFs takes this process one step forward, but before that can happen the old negatives must be digitized. That can be an even more difficult and expensive process than digitizing books because of the time it takes to prepare the images, which includes cleaning them, trying to determine which image is in the negative and deciding how much shadow and light to let in, said Paul Conway, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information.
With a photo negative, technicians are looking to capture the original intent of the photographer, recreating what photographic developers would have done decades ago, said Doug Reside, curator of the theatre division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Additionally, older negatives can be fragile and can suffer from age-related effects, including “vinegar syndrome,” where a chemical creeps into the negative and warps the image.
Once the images were selected, it took a few weeks for archival photographers to digitize the “West Side Story” images at a digitization studio in Queens and less than a day for Reside to create the GIF. He used a combination of the digital photos and put the images together in Google Photos make the GIFs. A book in stable condition can cost as little as 10 cents per page or up to $1 depending on the book’s condition and whether the pages remain bound or are taken apart for scanning, Owens said. The entire process of digitizing a single negative, including preparation and cataloging, could cost $4 to $5 per image, Conway added.
The New York Public Library received a grant from the Google Cultural Institute
Read more: Broadway’s underground bowling league
Libraries are beginning to add digitization into their core budgets and run local fundraising campaigns, Owens said, but grants are still part of the effort. In addition to Google, institutes such as Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities bestow grants. The Library for the Performing Arts received the majority of its collection through donations from the photographers or from their estates, but it will also buy collections occasionally.
Overall, the library has archives that date back to the 1700s and photos that date to the late 1800s, which are kept in climate-controlled rooms in the library basement or in storage facilities. The library has archives for most major playwrights and shows including glass plate images, computer files from production designers, papers from major actors and directors and video recordings of most Broadway shows dating back to the 1970s.
The GIF images were created from the photos of Leo Friedman and Joseph Abeles. The library has a large collection of work from photographer Martha Swope, who took several of the “West Side Story” photos in addition to decades of major shows such as “Cats” and “Annie,” and because of the number of photos, her work may be most amenable to making GIFs in the future, Reside said.
From the New York Public Library’s viewpoint, the “West Side Story” GIFs offer researchers and the public a rare chance to see the rehearsal technique of choreographer Jerome Robbins or the fact that Leonard Bernstein, the show’s composer, was conducting during a rehearsal while young lyricist Stephen Sondheim played piano. Another potential benefit from making these Broadway-themed GIFs: It may end up luring more people to the theater too.