State Records - Perth Metro Plans Project

[keithamoss]

State Records have blogged about their Perth Metro Plans Project to digitise and georectify Perth's historical sewerage plans.

To resolve this, we have been geo-referencing each plan, akin to providing latitude and longitude coordinates for all plans. To this end, the State Records Office is being ably assisted by spatial analyst Callan Wood who is providing his expertise, time and geo-referencing skills in a purely voluntary capacity.

This means we will be able to make the geo-referenced plans available through a modern mapping interface and searchable by current street location so that Perth residents can view their property as it is now through current satellite imagery, but also as it was many decades ago, even up to 100 years ago for some residents.

From what's being said it sounds like this is happening in desktop GIS software.

This project is also proving a good test bed for future geo-referencing work and how we could achieve this on a larger scale. There remains not only many thousands of maps, plans and charts in the State Archives Collection that would benefit from geo-referencing, but also photographic material and even text based records. In addition, we are gaining a better understanding of how geo-referencing software and systems work, as we will need to accept government data and information from these types of systems into the State Archives Collection in the future (a subject for another blog, at another time).

Related - the State Library are using Virtual Volunteering site to transcribe some of their non-spatial data. Virtual Volunteering could be a great org to talk to about integrating with our API.

Ping @attentive @johnwbryant @samwilson.