Contributed by: Meta Partenheimer
Organization: Cambridge Historical Commission
Dated Posted: May 13, 2026
Website: Visit External Site

Following a multi-year effort, The Cambridge Historical Commission has made its extensive architectural survey records digitally available to the public through the Cambridge Digital Architectural Survey and History (CDASH) project! Explore this resource at https://cdash.cambridgema.gov/.

In its original paper form, the Cambridge Historical Commission’s Architectural Survey fills 10 filing cabinets with physical materials detailing the history of the city’s built environment. The collection documents nearly every building in the city, demolished or extant, through newspaper clippings, articles, photographs, atlas details, ephemera, correspondence, and more. Now available online, users can browse over 131,000 pages of information covering nearly 15,000 distinct places in the city. At present, CDASH is best viewed on your laptop or desktop screen.

The user interface and the administrative back end for CDASH have been created with the popular open-source repository and discovery platform Omeka-S. Customizations to Omeka-S showcase the versatility of geographic referencing as a means of linking data from diverse sources. Additionally, our user and developer documentation is available on GitHub. We hope that the tools and procedures we are developing will be useful for other local historical commissions.