Visualizing Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Visual Heritage Website

Digitized primary resources are foundational to creating historical visualizations that can bring new light to ways of envisioning history tied to cultural heritage. The digitization of materials represents but a first step in a complex process that makes digital materials accessible and usable. It is a process that extends beyond creating digital objects to one that connects the object to metadata, description, access and use while also considering institutional policies and perspectives, copyright and licensing, intended audiences, use of social media, and interaction and user needs across a range of constituencies from historians and scholars to educators and the general public. The Brooklyn Visual Heritage website (BVH) ( http://brooklynvisualheritage.org ) represents a new visual resource for cultural heritage.