We've been so surprised at the excitement over the response and we've had to bump up our timeline to catch up the energy of everyone who's gotten in touch.
There's a few big things we're focused on right now: * Improving performance of CV recognition of historical buildings [https://github.com/nypl/map-vectorizer] from insurance atlases. * Parsing data from historical records. We love old documents that are basically databases in print form. Old playbills, city directories, tax records; lots of tabular data with locations, people, businesses - the names of history. Getting those names out and tied to locations are what become the searchable elements for places. * Rebuilding the underlying gazetteer. We worked with the team from Topomancy to prototype the underlying system a few years ago [https://github.com/topomancy/gazetteer]
There's a lot more, but that's where were starting. If you're interested, drop us a line at spacetime@nypl.org or sign up for our (comically nascent) forum at http://talk.spacetime.nypl.org where we're trying to coordinate most of the effort.