It seems like every few weeks another long-lost photo archive is discovered and digitized, and the newest of these archives is a set of one thousand historical images taken as part of a Farm Security Administration project in the early 20th century. The photos — some of which were taken by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee — were originally put together to combat poverty, but have instead become an important glimpse into what was then simply everyday American life.

All one thousand will be unveiled on The New York Public Library’s digital gallery soon, but until then you can find a small sampling of the work at the NY Times Lens Blog. Not every photo is exciting, or even artistic, but all of them show an important part of American cultural, and photographic, history.

A Historic Photo Archive Re-Emerges at the New York Public Library (via Popular Photography)

The New York Public Library has a massive collection of over 40,000 vintage stereographs (two photos taken from slightly different points of view). To properly share them with the world in 3D, the library has launched a new tool called the Stereogranimator. It lets you convert an old stereograph into either an animated 3D GIF (which uses “wiggle stereoscopy“) or an anaglyph (the kind that requires special glasses).
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