My name is Anthony. I'm one of the archivists here at the Frederick
Law Olmsted National Historic Site.
We are here today to talk about the mapping project that we've been
engaged in the last few years about trying to get a sort of visual representation of what the Olmsted
firms work was like; how widespread it was and what scope and
was where the hot spots are geographically. When I first started about 150 years
ago, working for the Olmsted National Historic Site,
we thought it would be great to have a wall map that had the push pins to show
where all the various six thousand projects of the Olmsted firm were located so that people can
say I'm from I'm from Dayton, Ohio, I didn't realize there's so much work
done there. Oh I didn't realize that California was a real area they worked in.
Wow, Florida has a whole bunch of sites. So we thought it would be great to have a wall map with all these push
pins in it. The trouble is that a wall map would have to be sort of almost
life sized to be able to get the concentration of
projects within Boston even or again Buffalo or
Rochester. There wouldn't be tiny enough push pin. So physically it just wasn't really
a feasible possibility to be able to have a wall map.
Then technology comes around and working with GIS-
geographic information systems, were able to do this virtually,
electronically, and with GIS coordinates so what we weren't able to do physically
with a wall map. So what we're looking at is an electronic map today, that
we've collected data of the locations of a number of
Olmsted projects. I think we probably have about three-quarters of the
mapped, so there's difficulty in finding some of them geographically. It's
a it's a work-in-progress you'll see but,
we also are proud of the work we've been able to do and we want to
show you today. The other big aspect we have is our research focus.
I'm one of the archivists, we have a team of archivists that have catalogued,
conserved and made available to the public over 139,000
landscape architecture drawings and plans so those are huge,
huge blueprints, a lot of them are. some of the very tiny but a lot of them are very large
documents that researchers come to us and want to see the historic landscape plan from
1909 for the grounds of the Johnson Estate or they want to
see the original plans for the Chicago World's Fair or they want to see
the development of the University of Tennessee so
we have those historic plans that people come to our site to do research for.
And, they used to do their notes,
take notes or take photographs and now we are doing a lot more digitization
we're scanning plans, we're getting those out the public in ways that make that accessibility
little easier, especially now in 2020 we're dealing with a pandemic.
we're a lot closer to a lot more processes of distance research
so that researchers don't have to come to Brookline from California or from Tennessee
or from Japan, they can just do the research via the electronic means we have setup.
So, that's a little bit of our program at Olmsted National Historic Site.
and now we're going to go to
the actual thing we're for. So we're looking at the Olmsted
Mapping Project GIS version.
And here we are. This is the main thing of it. It is a map
of the United States, which is fairly easy to understand. We started
about 15 years ago collecting data
of the actual locations, the longitude and latitude that will get us to a
very specific pinpoint of where these projects are located.
There's some easier ones, the Boston parks system. It's a fairly wide area. We've
also been able to pinpoint actual cemetery plots within a larger center context
so that we're looking at the Johnson cemetery plot in
Woodlawn that we're able
in some cases, in many cases we've been able to get that down to that level, to
where we're actually looking at these specific plot. Through much research, through a lot of work and
through using documents and sources outside of our collections we're able to get a lot of
this data through some research. So let's take a dive in. So what we're looking
at now is a map the United States with a lot of various colored dots all over it.
Just navigating it as with almost any map you can zoom
in just by zooming into the map and if we see we start res-ing in to the
go to the hot spot of say Providence, Rhode Island.
We started seeing those dots start to populate.
The places all these little tiny dots are locations of
Olmsted projects. If you click on a dot you'll see that it's for the project itself,
the West River project in Providence, Rhode Island looks like a small
job maybe just one plan from 1908 and right now there's no archival images posted.
Into another let's zoom in a little more.
Various colored dots we're going to take a look at in a minute but this gives you a sort of overview of
what the general map principle looks like.
So for Brown University looking at the data again from
our master list we see Brown University.
The job number is very important
The Olmsted firm created a very comprehensive job numbering system and that
is something we adhere to today, it's been very useful. We have not had to create a
system. Every project had a number for the Olmsted firm, Brown University here is
225. And every plan had a unique id number
so we'll see later the project number 225 and
a plan number creates a unique id numbering system that we as contemporary librarians
and archivists did not have to come up with so god bless them. So,
from here you see the job numbers, the location, you see there's 14 plans.
And, the date range of those plans is 1900 to 1906 which is, that's a
good-size number. The images that have been scanned as we digitize
our collections whereabouts as of today probably
three-quarters of the way through digitizing our
entire collection of 139,000 architectural plans. As we scan them they're getting loaded
on our Flickr page for now is our main access and as you can see from this
highlighted link the images will take us to the Flickr page for that particular project.
Brown University job number 225.
We see that the plans are here and the photo albums so
we're digitizing of course.
We're in the process of digitizing our plans and drawings collection. We've digitized the entire photo album
collection. The Olmsted firm created  photo albums for a large number of
their projects that documented sort of the before, during, and after
of the work that they did. So here on this page you see the plans and drawings that we have
digitized so far. There's 15 photos however many,
and then from there you can actually click on the individual plans and get more information about them.
So, you get to sort of detail you can zoom in on the images.
As well as see the meta data of the plan itself. So for each individual plan there's
this information about any notes, the date of the plan itself, what the title of the plan
was and the plan number. This unique id number is the important one
for whenever you request items or want to reference a particular plan within the collection.
As I mentioned, we've digitized the entire photo album
collection so all projects that have photo albums attached to them
have been scanned and we have loaded
to Flickr. So all of the photo albums of the work of the firm had been
scanned at that page and at the individual photograph,
photograph level so it's a great resource for researchers both for the landscapes and
also for just historians. These materials are sometimes unique and sometimes
pulled the firm might have cut and paste literally physically cut and paste from magazines into
their photo albums as a reference or as documentation of their work.
So, that's a little bit about our Flickr page. So again, those
projects that have material scanned from the collections are linked through
this images link on the GIS map page.
Scrolling a little bit we again we see this sort of
big hot spot of Boston, there's a lot of work done there.
Down the coast, Long Island, New York there are a lot of spaces. Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill
area, a lot of you see these light purple ones you see a
couple of those. All the different colored dots indicate,
indicate different project types so the light purple
are private sites.
Light-green are cemeteries. The bright yellow are grounds
of churches. On these menus off here to the left you can limit the
ones you want to see. If you only wanted to see the parks and parkways you can toggle that button and everything else will disappear. Or if you just want to see the parks
and the college campuses you see the orange here in the college campuses and
you see the greens and the parks and parkways. Toggling those off. So that's filtering by project
type. Otherwise the default is just sort of all the projects together.
Again, a filtering you can search by city. There's a
pull down menu that includes all those from those fields
or else you can just start typing in and say which
city you want to filter by.
Lastly, you can also filter by state or province if you just needed to see the Arkansas
jobs or California jobs. So it allows for a much larger
the slicing and dicing of the data,
the cutting and pasting there's some real deep dives one can do
into just this if you just want to see
the California items, you can select the California.
Toggle that on.
And, there you have it. You see just the California jobs are indicated there.
Navigating the map is also as easy as google if you wanted to
go to say Dayton, Ohio.
There is some auto-filling for you so it'll zoom right down to.
It doesn't look like there's anything in Dayton Ohio until we realize that again we have
filtered just for california so if we take that filter back off again,
there's our little Dayton hot spot. So, we see a lot of private estates
Let's see if we can filter just for the, I don't even know this if
there's residential institutions going on. Oh yes, looks like there's one.
And, that is the Deacon Hospital maybe two jobs
there and the Valley Hospital probably the same location.
And, again, there's a link to the images on Flickr from there.
So, that's the basic navigation of the map itself, that is the sort of easiest
why don't we get out of our type
And, back to showing all of the projects everywhere again.
So, that's the basic map navigation. There's a couple other ways to, let's
click out of there, for all this
data we've collected, it is available to researchers to do some more filtering and
data mining from this set of data. If you didn't
see, there's a little tab down here, a little arrow up. You can
click that arrow and that brings you to the tabular data of all
of these, all of the projects. So you see the project, the job number,
the location, down in this column
It's a spreadsheet with across the top are the types of
data we have and then in the rows are the jobs themselves with
the longitude latitude, with the location, with the project type
and then the Flickr page also. So you can get to this.
You can limit it to just the map extent. Say I just show me what's available
when I zoom in, it'll get very specific.
There's the one, two in Hamilton maybe.
So, again, it's ways of navigating the data through the map or you can navigate
the greater map, again, using filters
within the data, that if you wanted to filter for
just the,
let's say a very specific job number I know once you've never, you know,
you can do all sorts of sorts through those filters and find either number of
plans, and if you wanted to see anything that had no plans at all to it, if you wanted to do a search
on locations, states, those are all possible.
Cancel out of that and we go back to
 
Oh we X out of that.
Okay and then we're back the full monty.
Everything we have there.
So, that's another way to navigate through the map via the data itself. You're able
to scroll through all 5,000 if you want to, 6,000, I'm not sure how many lines
we have. Or you can do filtering work through.. There's some other ways to play with the
tabular data here to get you where to different ways to locate your data.
Some of the other features here are within this
information tab here gives you the full rundown of what the project is and what
what's useful to it. It's still sort of in beta testing, we're not quite sure how well,
this for everyone. If you want to download the entire data set from this
tabular view, there is a
mostly working, we'll say, way of getting all the data for you to drop
into a spreadsheet of your choosing and look at
the data yourself, if that is your desire. Some people love spreadsheets. There is a way
to download this. You should know that as the data is updated if you've saved this
data to your local computer, that won't be updated, it's
not a dynamic process, that you will need to, if you're working with that data, as we update our data
yours will NOT. It's a fundamental work of spreadsheet.
The other is that to collect this information
the longitude, latitudes has been a fair research project and we've
collected that research so that we've left breadcrumbs for our researchers,
or even ourselves, if there's questions about how we came to a particular
location longitude latitude, we'll want to know how that's done. So there's a
link here for the research notes.
I'm not going to open it fresh here because it would take awhile, but that link there will open up a
PDF of lower of a little over 1,500 pages so there is a lot
of information there. But again, there's citations for documents
inside and outside, for the Henry Grew project in Hyde Park, Massachusetts
project. There's some either links directly to the links might be outdated but,
there's work about looking at the plans.
This plan 2066-4 depicts the road between Gordon Ave
Stonybrook Reservation. You have some documentation of why we came to the longitude
latitude we have come to for any of these. There's a lot
again links may have changed, there's a citations to actual books
and physical books. A lot of these information comes from a website called
Historic Map Works that is a subscription, but
we've included documentation of the atlas citation, so that it
does, so we're able to get back to where these citations might be found,
what was our justification for including, for listing these places with the longitude latitude
we found them. It's not really
in, it goes a little bit in numerical order, not entirely, some are still to be
determined, but we didn't want to lose the breadcrumbs we did have so we
concluded even the ones that are not yet established and it's keyword
searchable so if, you know that you wanted to find anything on Brewer or you weren't sure of
the job number.
It would search through the document in a typical PDF fashion. So we do have ways
of navigating this very, very long document, very, very thick, meaty research
document, that does allow for not having to
scroll through all 5,000 jobs that are might be listed here.
So, that's our research notes document that is available both through the map component here on
the information tab as you pull that down. And, it's also available on our website and I'll show you that the best way.
So I think that covers generally, there's a couple other
fun bells and whistles you want to play with there's different ways to have the base map.
You can look at more interesting or more authentic mapping of the actual base map looks.
So you can play with that a little bit. There's other layers you can put down.
There's explanation of what the color codings are for legend as any map, so those are all available through the navigation here.
How to get to our map page is directly through our website at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.
That easy address is nps.gov/FRLA. That's up here at the top.
Park service websites are always named for the first two initials of the first two words of the name, that's a little hint for ya.
So we're at the FRederick LAw Olmsted National Historic Site.  nps.gov/FRLA
And that's our main website. Scroll down past all the 2020 Covid stuff and our current closures, you get down to the good stuff
with our Olmsted archives, how to visit us, and then down at the bottom here is a link to the Olmsted World View mapping work of the Olmsteds.
So you can get to this great, great, great project here through our main website, the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site website.
That I think about covers it. I think we're all set.
If you have any questions, definitely contact us. Let us know how this went and what you think of this and also it's a work-in-progress, the data is not always right, it was created by loving human hands.
We're happy to make corrections, we're always open to critiques and other ideas, if there's other things to do that we should be doing, let us know.
We're always happy to have that dialog.
I think that about covers us for this project.
If you like it, give it a thumbs up somewhere, anywhere.
Let us know, email us, contact us through our Facebook page, Instagram, or give us a ring when we're back in the office.
My name is Anthony Reed, I'm one of the archivists here at the Olmsted National Historic Site and this has been the Olmsted GIS Mapping Project.  Thanks, bye now!
