The Ledgers and Orders of The Cooper Union’s Great Hall have been made publicly accessible through the Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York (DCMNY) online portal thanks to a METRO grant-funded digitization project.

METRO, a non-profit member organization that works with New York City and Westchester County libraries and archives, awarded a grant to The Cooper Union Archives & Special Collections in 2023 to support transcribing and digitizing hand-written ledgers that document the history of the Great Hall. The ledgers date from 1858 to 1956 and offer insight into The Cooper Union's role as a public forum and resource for working people in Lower Manhattan. Among the records are accounts of meetings of the Women’s Loyal National League, established by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; speeches given by Frederick Douglass; the founding of the Chinese Civil Rights League; and gatherings of labor unions and reform groups.

Last fall, the physical Ledger and Orders of The Cooper Union were celebrated as part of an exhibition in Cooper's library. Its curators Mary Mann, archives librarian, and Dale Perreault, senior library technician, describe these records as "an ideal entry point into understanding how many people and groups make up the fabric of history—not just the textbook-famous, like Abraham Lincoln (another Cooper speaker), but also the laborers, immigrants, suffragists, magicians, and actors, all of whom climbed the same stone steps that we do every day, on our way to work and school."

With this final phase of the METRO digitization project, The Cooper Union Archives & Special Collections joins 28 other member cultural institutions, libraries, and archives that have contributed to DCMNY, which is a digital space dedicated to the history of the Metropolitan New York Region. The ledgers are also included in Voices of the Great Hall, a digital archive supported by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation that launched in May 2022.