The San Francisco Public Library relaunched its digital archive this week — 80,000-plus items, free, no card needed — and a lot of what's inside is a block-by-block record of the neighborhoods that keep changing.

The record of nearly every corner in this city now lives at one address you can reach without leaving the couch: digitalsf.org (external source, opens in a new tab), the San Francisco Public Library's digital archive, which relaunched this week on a new platform holding more than 80,000 items — free, and with no library card needed. The relaunch was first reported by SFGATE.

The collection is run out of the San Francisco History Center (external source, opens in a new tab) on the sixth floor of the Main Library at 100 Larkin Street — the room that keeps the physical prints, maps, manuscripts and recordings the digital version is scanned from. What changed this week is the front door: the archive moved onto a new system with a faster search and, the library says, a better image viewer. The material was already there. It's just easier to walk through now.

For a beat that spends its days watching storefronts trade hands and awnings come down, this is the before-picture. The library's highlighted collections include a run of newspaper clippings on mid-century life in Bayview Hunters Point, a batch of color slides documenting murals shot around town, and street photographs from the 1800s — earlier drafts of the same blocks that keep getting redrawn. There's a Branch Archives collection sorted the way the city actually is, one neighborhood at a time, from the Anza branch out on 37th Avenue to the Mission branch at 1234 Valencia.

The headline holdings are the ones that travel: Harvey Milk's handwritten speeches, oral histories from the city's Black communities, and pictures of San Francisco in the wreckage of the 1868, 1906 and 1989 quakes. Fresh collections land every month — the newest set reaches back to city ordinances from 1862.

Christina Moretta, the History Center's photo curator and manager, framed the relaunch as a way into the city's past, one built from the ordinary neighborhood life the place grew out of, in a statement the library provided and SFGATE quoted.

It's all free to browse, and downloadable too. The useful part, for anyone who's stood on a corner and wondered what was there before the thing that's there now: type the street name into the search box and see what the city bothered to hang on to.