ResearchBuzz

The Penn Libraries have announced Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Histories, Plans and Futures, a database of neighborhood-based reports issued by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission between 1946 and 1990. This database, which contains text, maps, and photographs, is available at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/PhilaNeighborhoods .

There are several ways you can explore this exhibit. You can browse the reports, get a map overview and explore that, or search by keyword. I don’t know much about Philadelphia so I browsed the map, picking Mount Airy neighborhood in the Upper North district. There were five reports on this area. I picked one of them at random and got a link to a new window with a image set of the report. paging through it, I could read most of the text on the report, but had to click on the images to get details and handwritten notations.

For people who might want to get research off this site for historical purposes, I’d add one tool: the ability to enter a Philadelphia e-mail address and get pointers to which district and neighborhood that is.

The Pennsylvania State Archives has added over 300,000 images of land records to the Web. (That’s more than 31 gigs of data.) You can access these new records at The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission’s Web site, at www.phmc.state.pa.us . (That URL is a redirect that’ll take you to portal.state.pa.us and a much more complex URL.)

The additions include warrant registers (1733-1957), patent indexes (1684-1957) and the Philadelphia Old Rights index. You can start your search here; be sure to read the instructions because there are several sets of documents you can search.

A lot of the available documents are in PDF format so make sure you’ve got Adobe Acrobat reader.

Here’s a great historic photography archive. PhillyHistory, at http://www.phillyhistory.org/, currently features only 25,000 images of Philadelphia dating back to the 1800s, with more images coming at the rate of 2000 a month.

From the front page you can search by street address or by neighborhood, but not by search term. From the search page you can do a keyword search or narrow it by year. A simple search for billboard found eight results, five to a page. Results include a thumbnail as well as a brief caption and description of the page.

The detail pages are terrific; they have a much larger picture and — this is the neat part — a map of the neighborhood and the place where the picture was taken. On the detail page you also have the option to buy glossies of the pictures — the one I looked at was $10 for a 5×7 and $20 and 8×10. On all the searches I tried I got results that spanned several decades except the search for fire; that one found several pictures of fireworks for one particular year.

I found when I did some simple keyword searching that not all words would get me many results. Results for car and truck were pretty disappointing; factory actually had no results. However street brought over 200 results. Do some experimenting here.

In addition to the archived photographs this site also has a Historic Streets Index (search by name) as well as a nice Philadelphia-oriented link list and a blog. Plenty to see here, but you might have to try several different search terms.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .