Today was the deadline to comment on the National Park Service’s draft digital photo policy. An earlier article on state leadership on digital photo policies cited North Carolina’s policy of requiring digital photos.
I recently asked Peter Sandbeck, who administers North Carolina’s Historic Preservation Office and serves as the Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, how they made the decision to implement this policy:
We took the leap with our eyes open and a sense that this was quickly going to bring great benefits to our process, which it has.
Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of more than 2.600 properties in North Carolina on the National Register of Historic Places.
Michael Southern, the state’s Senior Architectural Historian and GIS Coordinator, picked up the discussion from there. Michael, who has worked for 35 years in historic preservation in North Carolina, said the move was “a little painful at first,” so to help his colleagues bring their skills up to the level required by the Office’s new policy, he set up a computer lab in their conference room and held full-day sessions.
He also worked with the consultants throughout the state who assist with National Register filings, including making trips to the houses of some to walk them through what they were going to need to do in the future.
Here’s the full e-mail interview with Michael:
Q: What prompted the move to requiring digital photography? Peter mentioned “great benefits to our process.” What are the major ones?
A: With the improvements being made in affordable digital cameras, by 2004 or 2005 it seemed clear to us that digital was a better way to record buildings for architectural surveys. As the policy states, “Digital photography offers speed, flexibility, and cost savings in acquiring, editing, sharing, presenting, and printing photographs. It enables use of a single camera to obtain photos for every step in the process of recording, presenting, and nominating a property or district.”
While most of us would agree that traditional view camera photography is superior as “art” photography and for special images of VIBs (Very Important Buildings), the point is that thousands of photos of buildings and their architectural details and settings are taken in the course of a survey. The images need to be good descriptive photos, and improvements in affordable SLR (and even some non-SLR) digital cameras made their images equal to or better than 35mm film cameras. In fact, I would say that the quality of photos taken by our consultants has improved since they have switched to digital. The benefits have been improved photo quality, improved presentations (PowerPoint versus slides), easy sharing, and of course, speed and cost savings.
Q: What process was used to develop and ultimately put in place the new policy? In other words, what entity made the decision, and what did it take to get to that point?
A: Before Peter became our Deputy SHPO in mid-2004, he had been in the thick of digital imagery issues at Colonial Williamsburg. The impetus came from him with concurrence of senior staff. I drafted the first efforts at a digital policy, which went through multiple reviews (first by our staff, and later by consultants) and several subsequent revisions and improvements. Some of the least technical members of our staff had an important role showing how we needed to clarify the “geekspeak” and make things as clear as possible for general users.
Q: What concerns were voiced when the revision was made? Any strong objections?
A: Some of the older consultants—some have been doing field work in N.C. since the early 1970s—were skeptical and wary of the change, but I don’t remember what I would call strong objections. (But it’s possible there were objections that never reached my ears!). Most have made the transition to digital pretty well. These people are mostly traditional historians with limited computer skills beyond word processing and email, and I have spent a good bit of time on the phone and even visiting the homes of some of them to help them with downloading, batch processing, and PowerPoint questions. I would say that states that wish to implement a digital policy need to provide at least some measure of technical support of this nature. But some of the younger ones were actually a step ahead of us with the new technology.
Q: Have you run into any problems with the implementation? Peter mentioned ”long-term storage, cataloging.” To what extent are you looking at storage in the cloud as the solution for storage?
A: Storage and cataloging are the biggest problems. We’ve tried to address the cataloging issue with a photo naming protocol based on survey site numbers that serves at least in a rudimentary way as its own index. For the time being we are simply storing the photos by county in an “Image Library” on our server. As the collection grows, storage space and retrieval are going to be more serious issues. I’m not familiar with storage in the cloud technology, but I wonder whether the state would be open—at least for now—to using that sort of external service for public records.
Q: Did you consider, or do you plan to consider, adding geotagging as a requirement?
A: Not in the near term, though we recognize how it could be beneficial in certain types of survey work in the future. Most of the field work is done by consultants, and as I indicated, many are decidedly non-technical and uncomfortable with computers in general, so it’s one step at a time. Our GIS system bases site identification on the survey site numbers, and that will facilitate linkage to associated photos that use the site number at the beginning of the photo name.
Q: Can people view these digital images online now? If not, do you have plans to make this possible in the future?
A: We have begun making PDFs of recent National Register nominations that have some photos included. The first of these will begin to appear online within a couple of months, we hope. But it will be a slow process working through our National Register roster and into other categories of historic properties and districts. We are in the very early stages of considering how we will present GIS mapping and general survey materials online.
Q: Are submissions (text, in addition to photos) done electronically when they are sent to you? Can these be viewed online?
A: Survey reports and National Register nominations are submitted in word processing format, usually Word. We have also developed a survey database in Access that is used by consultants for new surveys, survey updates, and new historic district nominations. The database is designed to serve as a stand-alone project data manager, but it also links to GIS. Except for the nomination documents converted to PDFs to be posted soon, these other materials are not online.
. . . .
Read the full text of North Carolina’s revised photo policy, which now . . .
requires the use of digital photography for all grant-funded survey and National Register nomination projects.
