After a highly successful 15-year project to conserve and catalog the landscape design firm's 139,000 historic plans & drawings collection, the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service (www.nps.gov/frla) has launched an ambitious effort to increase the visibility of and the access to these materials, while at the same time decreasing their handling and, in turn, preserving them for generations to come.
In 2000, while completing the conservation and cataloging effort, Olmsted NHS partnered with the National Association for Olmsted Parks (NAOP) and, with funding from the National Center for Preservation Technology & Training (NCPTT), created an online textual database as a comprehensive research tool to the complete Olmsted body of work. This includes a "Master List" search for Olmsted projects, as well as an archival search for plans & drawings, photo albums, correspondence and planting lists, located at both Olmsted NHS and the Library of Congress. This database, the Olmsted Research Guide Online (ORGO, available at www.rediscov.com/olmsted) remains the comprehensive search tool for Olmsted project-based research. Additional finding aids for the firm's diverse historical manuscript collections can be found at the Site's archival collections website at https://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm. As technologies have evolved, so have users' demands. Increasingly, as new media and the digital revolution have required the turn towards electronic access, Olmsted NHS began developing a digital repository of its images by creating a vast collection of digitized records that more easily fulfilled researcher requests. We began by comprehensively digitizing the collection of historic photo albums, and responding to researcher requests for digital copies from the plans & drawings collection of oversize materials. After exploring a number of options and in consultation with local and national experts, including NPS colleagues in Washington DC, it was decided to begin with a familiar off-the-shelf product – Flickr – due to its popularity and ability to serve as a portal to our digital collections for the general public. A more robust and NPS-integrated solution is being investigated utilizing the native database required of all Department of the Interior units for collections accountability. While the ORGO database website remains THE comprehensive research tool for the broadest inquiry into the Olmsted work, this easy-to-use and recognizable product promises the most accessible means of delivery possible. Our Flickr collections can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/olmsted_archives/collections. Now, just weeks after the National Park Service celebrated the centennial of its founding, we are proud to announce that we have uploaded our 100,000th image! This includes the entire historic photograph album collection (with a small number of exceptions) and a sizable portion of the oversized plans & drawings collection. We have recently embarked on another ambitious project to comprehensively digitize the collection of Plans & Drawings. With the recent allocation of internal NPS project monies from a nationwide "Recreation Fee" fund and administrative assistance once again from NAOP, we have engaged a funded two-year Archivist / Digital Project Manager to shepherd the process. Those monies also support the purchase of an oversized digital scanner onsite as well as offsite digital photography of materials too large and/or too fragile to be handled in-house. Anthony Reed, Archivist Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site 99 Warren St. Brookline, Massachusetts 02445 http://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm The Olmsted Research Guide Online (ORGO): http://www.rediscov.com/olmsted Like us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/OlmstedNHS And check out our Flickr page here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/olmsted_archives/collections ****** Unsubscribe by sending a message to consdistlist-le...@cool.conservation-us.org Archives through August 2016 at http://cool.conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/ Archives from September 2016 onward at https://www.mail-archive.com/consdistlist@cool.conservation-us.org/
