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Determining the exact location of historical photos is always a challenge, but Surveyor, a new open source tool just released by the New York Public Library (NYPL) offers a neat crowdsourcing option.  It was developed to help address the problem of photos with very general titles, or only a street name or neighbourhood, some of which may no longer exist.

The NYPL has uploaded a set of photos and users can click through and move the map until the marker is in the correct location. There is an optional step of noting the direction and angle of the view of the image.

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This project is part of the New York City Space/Time Directory to create open source tools to help other cities, libraries and individuals to map and explore history.

Let us know if you’d be interested in adding a crowdsourcing project like this to your site. Crowdsourcing is a great way to encourage community involvement as well as enhancing the information about items in your collection. Contact Andornot to discuss possibilities!

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