The University of Oregon and Oregon State University may be bitter rivals in football and academia, but their librarians have happily joined forces to make the state's impressive architectural history accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
Using UO's digitized collection of 5,000 photos of the state's historic buildings and OSU's staff of software coders, the two institutions created the web-based app buildingoregon.org.
Out for a walk? Curious about an old building you just passed? Check this out: You can now whip out a mobile device, log on to the site and pull up geo-coded historical information about thousands of structures.
Bam! Just like that, with the tap of a finger, you're discovering history on the go.
"The digital age has made it a little easier to collaborate," said OSU head librarian Faye Chadwell, adding that the project allowed the libraries to meld their respective strengths and resources.
Marion D. Ross
The architectural guide uses GPS to find your location and draws largely from the research of Marion D. Ross, a former UO architecture professor who obsessively documented the state's wild array of building styles dating back to the Oregon Trail. The mobile site features scores of photos taken by Ross, who preferred to shoot in color, from 1947 to 1978.
Every entry provides a wealth of architectural and historical data compiled by UO researchers, who often had little more than hard-to-decipher scribbled notes from which to work.
From the photos, it's clear that Ross -- who an expert in Islamic architecture, by the way -- found some Oregon buildings more intriguing than others.
Information about the hardly celebrated 124-year-old Concord Building in downtown Portland, for example, contains 15 photo snapped by Ross. Meanwhile, the entry for the well-known Governor Hotel, built in 1908 by William Christmas Knighton, offers only one shot.
Many photos in the collection represent cultural heritage sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Chadwell said the OSU Libraries created an open-source framework that can be used by other programmers to make various cultural heritage projects and collections accessible to mobile historians and tourists.
In fact, the coding could be used in the future to easily build on-the-go guides to everything from public art to places housing historical archives in Oregon.
The two libraries have also collaborated on digitizing collections, including sheet music and historical national forest photos, through the Oregon Digital portal.
-- Joseph Rose
503-221-8029
jrose@oregonian.com
@josephjrose