NYPL Labs

As bloggers inside the library started to write, it became obvious that the backend powering all that writing needed to become more scalable. Drupal proved to be a good choice to power a collective view of curators, branch librarians, reference librarians, map librarians, and others as they turn their work inside out through writing.

Drupal has many fine modules written for it, over 2000 at last count. Among others, NYPL uses the Tagadelic module to power the tag cloud which is built from the collective taxonomy at the bottom of the page.

The Operator Firefox add-on further enhances the experience of the subjects under discussion, linking you from the library outward.

Finally, one Easter egg: If you go to the Maps page, it comes with a handy historical Google Earth file, so you can overlay the past with the present.