PhillyHistory.org, the Philadelphia Department of Records’ historic photo and map website powered by our Sajara product, now features two new groups of images from the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
The Historical Images of Philadelphia collection includes over 170 photos taken throughout the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With images of everything from Memorial Hall to the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty, the Centennial Exhibition collection contains 1,600 beautiful photographs documenting America’s celebration of 100 years of history and progress.
Since the geographic search option on PhillyHistory.org is such a popular feature, we wanted to geocode the Free Library images as well. This proved to not be so straightforward for the Centennial images. The exhibition was located in Fairmount Park, an area that has changed dramatically since 1876. To find the coordinates of the original locations of the Centennial buildings, we needed to georeference an historic map of the Centennial grounds. By overlaying the historic map with a current street map in ESRI’s ArcGIS and finding a few buildings and intersections that still existed to serve as anchor points, we were able to create a new image that showed the locations of the historic buildings. We then found the coordinates for specific buildings and used them to geocode photos of those buildings, making the images searchable by location.
Including collections from multiple organizations in the system is something that we’ve always hoped to be able to do. When PhillyHistory.org first debuted, it contained a few thousand images from the collection of the Philadelphia City Archives. Over the next couple years, the Philadelphia Water Department contributed 1,500 historic images, the Department of Records provided 4,800 property maps, and the Free Library added nearly 200 historic maps dating from the 1850s and 1860s. The addition of the Free Library images provides PhillyHistory.org users with even greater access to the historical resources of the city.
Of course, including the collections of various organizations in a single database is not as easy as signing an agreement and uploading some images. Institutions have different needs ranging from collection size to collection management processes to available metadata. We built Sajara, our geographic digital collection management system, to accommodate these different needs by a series of features that enable watermarks, metadata and activation of features (like commenting, photo print sales, licensing, etc.) to be configured on a collection-by-collection basis. Web-access prevents the necessity of installing software at different offices, and a system of roles and levels of access ensures that while multiple organizations may have their data in the same database, they have the ability to manage only their own collections.
The result is a database that enables several organizations to pool their resources and increase public access to their collections. Rather than switching from website to website, users can visit PhillyHistory.org to view amazing images and maps from three separate organizations. And we are now working with additional institutions to add their images in the future.
The images above each show the same property outline with a different historic map in the background. In order from left to right: 1942 Land Use Map, 1859 Hexamer Locher Map, and the linen DOR Parcel Records Maps 
