Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Historic Records Digitization topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Portland publishes digitized historic-preservation records and searchable PDFs
Summary
Portland staff released a major update to the city's historic-preservation website, posting digitized 1990s-era survey forms and high-resolution photos and adding searchable PDFs and district boundary maps to aid applicants and researchers.
Portland Historic Preservation staff announced an update to the city's historic-preservation website that makes digitized designation survey forms, historic photos and district boundary maps available online.
The upgrade, which staff said was two years in the making, stems from a certified local government grant awarded by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission in May 2023. Preservation staff told the board the digitization of paper records finished in September 2024 and the scanned files have now been organized into street- and district-level PDFs that applicants can access on demand.
The change is aimed at speeding routine research and permit review for applicants and the public. Evan (preservation staff) told the board, "we've made a pretty substantial update to the Stark Preservation website that I'm personally quite excited about," and demonstrated a searchable, bookmarked PDF for a sample district during the meeting.
Staff said the uploaded records include assessment forms with notes on materials, ownership history and photographs taken mostly between 1990 and 1997. The department scanned original glossy prints at the highest resolution available through the vendor; those images and the associated survey forms are now bookmarked by street and property. Staff also described how other historic resources can be found: 1924 tax-photo scans are hosted by a third-party archive the department uses, and assessor tax records from the 1950s through the 1990s remain available through the assessor's site.
The board asked whether the PDFs are discoverable by internet search engines; staff said the files were made searchable during scanning, and that search-engine indexing is likely to improve over time as the pages attract traffic. Staff added that recent permit records are available through the city's citizen self-service portal, but records older than roughly the last decade may still require staff retrieval from paper files.
City staff said the site will be maintained and may be enhanced later with improved mapping and, potentially, hosted image files on partner platforms.
For applicants and researchers: the site now offers bookmarked, searchable PDFs of designation survey forms and district maps; original glossy photos were scanned at high resolution; tax-photo and assessor resources are available via linked repositories or the assessor's portal.
