In July 2019, EDAC required a grant through the NARA’s NHPRC (National Archive and Records Administration’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission) to digitize historical aerial photos from 1934-1987. The photos are from New Mexico and nearby regions in neighboring states. Digitizing these photos included a process of scanning, georeferencing, creating metadata, indexing, archiving, and making them web-accessible.
An API was also created by the EDAC IT Team to georeference images and add metadata by users online. The software development is open source and the code is available here.
The project was finished in June 2022, with a grand total of 32,358 images digitized and free to download for the public. These photos can be accessed on historicalaerialphotos.org and RGIS.
