December 2020 – Are you one of the many who helped the usage of the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives surge by 25 percent while staying at home this year? Perhaps you started by looking up the program for the concert we gave on the day you were born, then chased link after link and came upon a rare photo of Marian Anderson taken before she was famous. We have good news for you!
The Philharmonic just received a $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to ensure that this trove going back to the Orchestra’s founding in 1842 will be able to grow during a time of rapid technological evolution. In fact, the Philharmonic is the only performing arts organization ever to receive an Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant for a digital project. Over the next five years this partnership will help fund objectives such as moving the contents to the cloud, building an advanced search function, and incorporating multimedia storage functionality appropriate to today’s and tomorrow’s media.
The NEH has helped make possible a long, long future for the free, online archive that sheds light on 178 years of American cultural evolution through more than 4 million pages of correspondence, operation files, financial ledgers, minutes from business and artistic meetings, marked scores, printed programs, press clippings, and more.
