Unearthing St. Augustine’s Colonial Heritage

Project Link: Unearthing St. Augustine’s Colonial Heritage (http://maps.fiu.edu/saug/)

Funding Agency: City of Coral Gables

People: Zhaohui Fu, FIU GIS Center PI — Subcontractor / Boyuan Guan, FIU GIS Center Developer / John Nemmes, UF PI / Thomas Reed Caswell, UF PI

The University of Florida (UF) has partnered with the City of St. Augustine to “unearth” archival repositories which have been previously inaccessible to researchers worldwide.

The digital archive supports research in a broad range of subjects: Florida and U.S. history, Spanish colonies, Native Americans, slavery, exploration, architecture and urban planning, social and economic development, missionary work, military defenses and warfare.

Currently, over 25,000 photographs, maps, overlays of the city, architectural drawings, government records, transcriptions of key Spanish documents, and archaeology site summaries have been digitized, with a majority of them geo-located. The collection not only satisfies the needs of a wide variety of researchers, including historians, archaeologists, architects, historic preservationists, and those in the digital humanities, but the project also helps in telling St. Augustine’s unique “story” of colonial heritage on a global scale.

The FIU GIS Center partnered with UF Libraries to create the interactive web interface for this digital archive collection.