Old and free stuff can be sexy too! An overview of various efforts to geotag publicly available historical photos, organize and map them in a useful fashion, build community around history, and keep these resources free and accessible to machines and humans. Includes a demonstration of web and mobile applications bringing history to life on the map. We’ll consider non-commercial models to promote mapping within the fields of historical and cultural preservation.

Jon Voss is founder of LookBackMaps, an innovative public history project that is one of many new mashups in the field of historical and cultural heritage websites. He also runs jumpSLIDE networks, a small IT consultancy in San Francisco. Voss has been managing IT projects for non-profits and small to medium businesses in the Bay Area for the last ten years. His work on mapping historical photos stems from a love of history and a chance run-in with a band of privy diggers who excavated the hole of an 1870’s outhouse in his back yard in SF’s Mission district.