New Mexico’s Major Initiative on Digitizing, Archiving, and Web-Publishing Historical Aerial Photos

Abstract

Historical aerial photos are important historical records, and subsequently, they have been widely used in many fields to study the physical and human characteristics of a place. Unfortunately, most historical aerial photos remain un-digitized and un-georeferenced on aging photographic film rolls, which significantly limits their usefulness for research and practice. This article is dedicated to discussing a funded initiative focusing on digitizing, georeferencing, creating metadata, indexing, archiving, and web-publishing New Mexico’s historical aerial photos. As part of this initiative, a web application was developed to enable online georeferencing to increase georeferencing productivity, bounding box display to present the ground coverage extent of each historical aerial photo, and spatial search to increase the discoverability and use of historical aerial photos. Based on a set of open standards and open source software and libraries, application programming interfaces for the aforementioned web application were also developed and freely shared with archival and record management organizations across the United States to enable them to develop similar web applications, and ultimately, promoting the access and use of historical aerial photos for various purposes.

Keywords:

• historical
• aerial photos
• digitizing
• georeferencing
• web-publication

Data Availability Statement

All web-published historical aerial photos for this research project are available at https://historicalaerialphotos.org. The developed web application’s APIs are freely shared at GitHub (https://github.com/edac/georeference-api), Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/edac-code/georeference-api), and GitLab (https://gitlab.com/edac/georeference-api).

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under Grant Federal Award ID Number RM-102733-19. We also would like to express our greatest gratitude to Mr. Gar Clark from New Mexico Department of Information Technology and the University of New Mexico for providing cost-sharing support.