Stanford buildings in OpenHistoricalMap

[1ec5]

The Rumsey Map Center at Stanford often holds map-related events that are opportunities to bring up OpenStreetMap and OpenHistoricalMap. For example, @jeffreyameyer and I will be demonstrating OHM there in August for the California Map Society’s annual conference. The talk will be much more relevant if we can demonstrate OHM’s coverage of the campus we’re speaking at.

Stanford Maps & Records has a basemap that includes buildings, but it isn’t suitably licensed for OSM. Rather than go through the trouble of getting this data released into the public domain, I’d suggest starting off with a portion of Santa Clara County’s building layer, which is explicitly in the public domain (and by law). The county building layer has reasonable geometry, although some buildings are conjoined due to the LiDAR-based collection method. Each building comes with a “base height” and “building height” presumably in feet, but we’ll need to double-check.

The county building layer doesn’t have any building names, but I figure we can get plenty them from out-of-copyright maps in the Stanford University Map Collection or the Stanford Atlas. As for start dates, the university archives have a number of useful resources, but it’ll take some work to find dates for everything:

• Stanford University, University Architect / Campus Planning and Design, records, 1945-2018
• Stanford University: An Architectural Tour
• An Architectural and Historical Survey of Stanford University Buildings (CC BY-NC-SA, but we’re only citing it, not copying it; not available online but I can visit in person)
• Historic Houses

The usual local resources, such as CEQA reports, may also be useful for establishing dates.

The historical sources will provide information on buildings that are no longer standing, which the county building layer does not include.

[1ec5]

The geometries in the county building layer are reasonably clean, but they filled in a lot of courtyards that’ll have to be redrawn manually:

[1ec5]

Here’s a crude GeoJSON of the Stanford campus to filter the county building layer on.

[jeffreyameyer]

Perhaps easier access than the SCC geoportal: SCC GIS shapefiles at Stanford

Old Campus maps

[1ec5]

@jeffreyameyer looks like you’ve already imported the buildings. What’s left to do before we close this issue out?