Creating the Marlborough Historical Society's Site

This site was built and is maintained by volunteers without technical or engineering skills using these tools and services:

  • Domain name registration and hosting: 1&1, one of the largest hosting providers.
  • Site creation software: WebsiteBuilder Plus, which includes a WYSIWYG editor and templates, also from 1&1.
  • Accepting payments: PayPal.
  • Event registration and reporting: Eventbrite (works with PayPal).
  • Photos: The Historic Photos slideshow uses the free PictoBrowser, which displays photos we've uploaded to Flikr.
  • Newsletter: VerticalResponse.

By making information about Marlborough and the Marlborough Historical Society available to anyone anywhere anytime, our site is an important part of delivering on our commitment to historic preservation, education, and celebration. 

Our site is built and maintained by volunteers and is supported 100% by donations, memberships, and purchases of Society merchandise.


Putting the property survey online

In 2008, as part of the Marlborough Historical Society's commitment to historic preservation and eduction, the entire contents of this five-volume printed report, Marlborough Survey of Historic, Architectural, and Cultural Resources, were scanned and put online here as searchable documents for everyone to use.

One of our central goals in this project was to make the information as easy to get to and use as possible, while recognizing that, other than a few-page narrative, the rest of the report was available only as paper files.

Because of this, the entire five volumes had to be scanned. 

Our tests using OCR software showed that because the critical first sheet of every property or area was typed on a form, the OCR output was not usable.  (View the test sheet scanned as an image and the OCR output of this same sheet.)

As a result, the scanning was done at 200 dpi and the text was converted into searchable PDFs using ReadIris Pro 11, which turned all of the text and some of the handwritten map notation into searchable text.   (More on ReadIris Pro 11 at Amazon.)

Each document was saved using the street or area that it described as the title.

Instead of using the slow WYSIWYG interface in WebsiteBuilder Plus for uploading and linking to documents, we FTP'd the documents up using FireFTP, the Firefox add-on.

We created the text for the HTML by capturing the file names from the directory using the free trial version of DDFileCatcher. Then we copied them into textpad, wrote the HTML by hand, and used the "Insert your own code" utility in WebsiteBuilder Plus to drop them into the page.

We also put the narrative (Parts I and II) up as HTML. 

Many improvements can be made to what has been done here, including adding anchor links to make the narrative page easier to navigate, breaking up the narrative page into multiple pages, adding pictures of properties, and linking from the references to houses, streets, and areas in the narrative to the PDFs that describe them in greater detail.

With the widespread availability of inexpensive tools and hosting, there are many ways that future surveys can be made much easier and more useful at every step of the way, from creating, correcting, approving, and publishing , to supplementing and updating by staff, consultants, and members of the community.