[MassHistPres] Publishing information about historic properties online and LA's new site

[Lee Wright]

The city of Los Angeles, with the support of the Getty Foundation, has launched a major web-based initiative that makes information about historic places in LA available through the Arches platform, an open source initiative: http://www.historicplacesla.org

Does anyone know of any roughly-similar effort at the state or local level here in Massachusetts?  Are there any plans to move the data that is currently in MACRIS onto a modern platform with an easy-to-use interface and multiple views of the data (and ideally with an API)?

Details on the announcement on the Arches site (http://archesproject.org/historicplacesla-org-powered-by-arches-v3-0-launches-in-los-angeles/ <http://archesproject.org/historicplacesla-org-powered-by-arches-v3-0-launches-in-los-angeles/>):

The largest implementation to date of the Arches open source platform, HistoricPlacesLA.org <http://www.historicplacesla.org/>, the Los Angeles Historic Resource Inventory, was launched on February 24, 2015, at Los Angeles City Hall, marking an important milestone for the Arches project. It offers a preview of the powerful search capabilities that will be available in Arches v3.0, as well as cool features such as related resource graphs that allow users to explore data relationships.

HistoricPlacesLA is an exciting new tool for the Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources, as well as conservation professionals and the residents of Los Angeles, to better understand and protect the character of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods as Los Angeles continues to grow and change.

Customized for the City of Los Angeles, the HistoricPlacesLA.org implementation of Arches contains the following historic resource data:

Current data from the City’s and Getty’s joint effort, SurveyLA, an in-progress, multi-year citywide historic resources survey—covering approximately 880,000 parcels over 500 square miles, and
Data regarding the locally- and nationally-designated historic resources and districts within the Los Angeles city limits.

While the data contained in HistoricPlacesLA.org is a work-in-progress, at launch it includes more than 25,000 historic resources and just under 200 historic districts. Adding other types of Arches resources, such as those that represent persons/organizations, activities (e.g., surveys), historical events, and information resources (e.g., images, documents), the number of system resources soars to more than 50,000. The number of relationships between different resources, such as between a historic resource and the architect that designed it, totals more than 80,000. Archaeological resources have not been surveyed as part of the SurveyLA project but will be included in a future survey phase.


— Lee Wright  |  Marlborough  |  lee at leewright.net <mailto:lee at leewright.net>  
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