NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY USES SOFTWARE FROM LUNA IMAGING, INC. TO ENABLE PUBLIC ACCESS OF "VISUAL TREASURES" VIA INTERNET

Insight® Software to Be Used to Manage Up to 600,000 Images Online

NEW YORK CITY, NY - August 14, 2000
The New York Public Library has selected Luna Imaging Inc.'s Insight® as the software platform for its recently announced "Visual Treasures" project. The Library's extraordinary initiative over the next five years will make more than 600,000 selections from its vast archival holdings available in digital form. Luna's Insight® software will allow the Library and its diverse audience of researchers, educators, students and a visiting public to use these collections over the Internet. In several cases, this will be the first time there has been practical access to many of these materials.

Insight® combines retrieval and access to text information with an extremely rich set of user tools for viewing, comparing and organizing high quality images online. Many of the Library's maps, documents, and photographs would be impossible to appreciate or study over the Internet without this level of fidelity and versatile handling. Insight® software will manage the growing repository of Library images, and was chosen for its ability meet the real-world requirements for large-scale, highly distributed image collections.

The "Visual Treasures" project will feature a variety of media including works of art, photography, historical documents, sound, early film and video. Included are 18th Century mid-Atlantic maps, artifacts of New York City history, rare photo documentation of the performing arts, and sources as diverse as the Library's Oriental and Slavic holdings.

Implementation of Insight® software for the "Visual Treasures" project builds on collaboration between the New York Public Library and Luna Imaging in previous image scanning projects, and on Luna's long experience and expertise in imaging technology for cultural heritage collections.

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