A year ago, Natalie Milbrodt was Special Collections and Archives Fellow in Queens College Libraries. As part of an independent project, Milbrodt interviewed Queens residents. The project expanded, and is now online, combining historical and contemporary photographs, maps and other ephemera, with oral histories in an effort to preserve the borough’s collective history.
It is more than a simple presentation of information however, and more than a snapshot of the past. Visitors to the website queensmemoryproject.org are encouraged to get involved; to add their own images, to record their own memories, adding to the data and expanding the story. According to the site, the project aims “to record borough history as it happens and empower residents from all ethnicities and walks of life to document their lives in the borough.”
The Queens Memory Project is a collaboration of the Archives at Queens Library and Queens College Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and Archives. The project was funded in part by by a $25,000 grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council in 2010.
The Queens Tribune featured the Queens Memory Project in a feature article, available here.