NOBLE Local History Roundtable NotesElizabeth B. Thomsen, Member Services Manager,

et@noblenet.org

Local History Projects and Sources of Information

MACRIS: Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information Systemhttp://mhc-macris.net/

Database of the Massachusetts Historical Commission “...including but not limited to, the Inventory of Historic Assets of the Commonwealth, National Register of Historic Places nominations, State Register of Historic Places listings, and local historic district study reports.”

HistoryPin: A global community collaborating around historyhttp://www.historypin.org/Primary focus is pinning images to a map, Integrates with Google StreetviewBoth organizations and individualsUpload images individually or batch

Historical Marker Databasehttp://www.hmdb.org/Extensive, well-organized, crowdsourced database of historical marker informationGeocoded, subject categories

Field Trip: Google mobile apphttp://support.google.com/fieldtrip/Shows nearby places and events from a variety of geocoded sources, including images and descriptions from many of the Arcadia books, the Historical Marker Database, Open Buildings and other sites of historic interest, as well as dining, shopping and entertainment sources. (You can configure which sources you want to see.)

Internet Archive

http://archive.org/Adding images from Metropolitan MuseumNew project: images extracted from Internet Archive books, currently being loaded on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

Wikimedia Commons“a database of 25,084,428 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute”http://commons.wikimedia.org/Photographs (and other files) contributed by individuals and organizations including Peabody Essex Museumhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elihu_Thomson_Administration_Building.jpg Google Book Searchhttp://books.google.com/advanced_book_searchLimit search by time, publisher, etc.If you use My Library, you can just search within those titles

Google Image Searchhttp://images.google.com/Search by image (URL or upload)Good for checking for more information about an image you want to use

Image Management Tools

Embedded metadata in image files includes both technical information recorded by the camera (geographic coordinates, date, time, settings) and descriptive information (title, description, photographer, copyright)

Geosetterhttp://www.geosetter.de/en/Free program that allows batch editing of image metadata using templates

Picasahttp://picasa.google.comEasy image organization and editing Doesn’t touch your original files, allows you to back out of changesReads and embeds metadata in image filesFacial recognition feature