[MassHistPres] Making city or town historic property survey information available online

[Lee Wright]

Our recent experience making our historic property survey available online
may help some of you who are wrestling with notebooks filled with paper.

 

In our case, a comprehensive property survey had been conducted in 1994 and
1995.  It followed the format of the times, with information typed onto
paper forms and pictures taped or stapled to the forms.  The content, which
fills five notebooks, is excellent-thanks go to Anne Forbes, the consultant
who conducted the research and wrote the report-but the greatest
availability has been in the library, where it could be used while at the
library.

 

This changed recently when the Marlborough Historical Society, as part of
its commitment to historic preservation and education, put the entire survey
online:

-          Detailed information on houses and neighborhoods (as searchable
PDFs): http://www.historicmarlborough.org/Property_Survey.html

-          Architectural overview and narrative (as HTML):
http://www.historicmarlborough.org/Architecture.html

While it was time-consuming, the cost of this effort has been modest.  We
spent less than $100 on software (on top of our monthly hosting expenses),
and the process was figured out and the work done by two non-technical
volunteers.

All of which means that if you have a survey that's in paper form, but don't
have much money, don't have a staff, and aren't a developer or engineer, you
can still put it online. 

Details, including information on the problems with using traditional OCR
software, recommendations for alternatives, and several further
improvements, are halfway down this page:
http://www.historicmarlborough.org/Technical_information.html.

Obviously today, with free and low-cost Web-based tools widely available,
there's a much better way to collect and publish the data and keep it up to
date.

Nonetheless, the excellent content of this once paper-bound survey is now
widely available where people check first when they're looking for
information, the Web.

Best regards-

Lee

............................................................................

Lee Wright

 

Trustee, Marlborough Historical Society

Commissioner, Marlborough Historical Commission

 

lee at leewright.net

+1 469-233-7712