| October 2021 – The Leon Levy Foundation has pledged an additional $1.5 million to the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives, matching a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities digital infrastructure challenge grant awarded to the Digital Archives in December 2020. This brings the total of the Foundation’s generous support of the Digital Archives since 2007 to $6.5 million. This latest gift underwrites a five-year modernization plan for the Digital Archives, which will include its expansion to lobby screens planned for the renovated David Geffen Hall, due to reopen in the fall of 2022. The new screens will bring the online collections to all David Geffen Hall lobby visitors.
Since its founding the Digital Archives, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year, has been made possible by unprecedented support from the Leon Levy Foundation. The partnership among the Levy Foundation, the NEH, and the New York Philharmonic will ensure that the Archives’s platform will remain at the forefront of technological developments and adapt to rapidly evolving research and content needs. Steps include migrating to a cloud-based system, building an advanced search function, and incorporating multimedia storage functionality to prepare for the future.
The Digital Archives’s holdings, which date to the Orchestra’s founding in 1842, include more than four million pages of correspondence, photographs, marked scores and orchestral parts, printed programs, financial ledgers, minutes from business and artistic meetings, and press clippings. During the 2019–20 season alone the Digital Archives was accessed by more than 289,000 unique users, receiving more than 1.8 million page-views; this reflects a 25 percent increase from previous seasons. |
