Welcome to the Cambridge Historical Commission Digital Architectural Survey and History archive.

This site represents the first stage of refinement for organizing the digitized documents from first three drawers the commission's  sixteen file cabinets (64 drawers of documentation on Cambridge's Buildings and their history.  The three drawers seleced fo rthis pilot cover a about half the addresses in East Cambridge.  The three drawers scanned fo rthis pilot  represent approximately 880 distinct places and approximately 4000 documents comprised of  about 7400 individual scanned pages.  

This collection uses two types of items to provide staff a means of discovering and attaching knowledge concerning places and documents:

Place Items represent different sorts of places, including: (Un-linked types below had no automatically detected instances in our three-drawer pilot. )

• Addresses -- Most of the data-generated places in CDASH at the moment are addresses.
• Buildings -- Although CDASH is all about buildings, the distinction of address references to information about buildings will take some human intervention.
• Sites -- A site may be a campus or complex with no buildings or many buildings.
• Parks
• Monuments
• Roads -- there are many folders in CDASH pertain to streetscapes
• Railways
• Bridges
• Landmarks  --  Could be a billboard or any well known non-building place. 
• Water Features
• Terrain Features

By automated overlays of CDASH Places with geographic layers representing registerd historic properties, users can selectively browse Historically Designated Places and the documents related to them. 

Document Items represent different sorts of documents found in the building files archive:  

• Architectural Inventory Form
• Historical Building Survey
• Research Form
• Research Notes
• Article or Monograph
• Exterior View
• Interior View
• Detail View
• Plan View
• Photo Contact Sheet
• Correspondence
• Supplemental Material
• Ephemera

Every document is related to a place item.  This makes it easy to discover all of the documents related to a particular place.  Place items provide the containers where information about the place can be consolidated.  Allieviating the need to store redundant informaion about places in the descriptive information about documents. 

Map Browse:  A big part of this project involved the wrangling of several geographic data-sets to correlate the addresses associated with CDASH documents with geographic coordinates.  These coordinates in turn allow  us to associate the places and items with several other data-sets reflecting property assessment, and several sorts of historical designations.  And we can also browse Place and Document items on a map.  This feature has a few issues at the moment which are discussed in out punch list. 

• Try the Map Browse.  At the moment, this function works best if you set the Search By Class: field to CDASH Place  to eliminate the display of lots of overlapping points for every document.

Map Punch-List

• Fix the Map Browse page  so that the browse map automatically filters for Place items, and puts the place title (usually the address) in the pop-up.  
• Add a lot of historical and modern reference maps to the map browse page.