Thanks to a generous grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, Friends of the New York Transit Museum will catalog and digitize the extensive and historically significant archival material in the New York Transit Museum collection that inextricably links the role of transportation to the history and development of Long Island – including documents, photographs, maps, postcards, timetables, ephemera, employee memorabilia, and more. Phase 1 of this three-year project will encompass cataloging and digitizing documents recently received from the Long Island Rail Road, including hand-drawn 19th-c maps that trace the acquisition of land for the rails, and creating a finding aid for that collection. Phase 2 will encompass surveying 10 unprocessed or partially-processed collections in the Archive that we believe contain Long Island material, identifying any material of interest to researchers or appropriate for exhibition, then processing, cataloging, and digitizing it. The grant will fund contracting a trained archivist to undertake the project, and the purchase of a flatbed scanner that is large enough to accommodate fragile oversize documents (like the land maps mentioned above) without exposing them to the risk of damage posed by a roll scanner. The digitized material will be added to our Digital Collections, available to anyone free of charge at nytransitmuseum.org/collections, and will be available for use in the Museum’s school and public programs. This project will make these items easily accessible to the public, and to the Museum, for the first time. Learn more: https://www.nytransitmuseum.org/gardiner/