I found out something really interesting (to me, anyway) today. It’s something that I took for granted – public records at city hall. I knew intellectually that I could go there and ask for information, but had never done so.
Large packets of information, folded neatly, going back to the decade of construction hold some sort of voyeuristic appeal. You can easily look through the history of a building, finding out that it’s been a toy store, a department store, and so forth. Knowing what’s been in the floors and corners lends an air of reality, an air of tangible history, instead of the anonymous and soulless relationship that i’ve had with most buildings.
I know that it puts me in the minority, but I had a lot of fun looking through old public records. I wonder what sort of emotional impact it might have to have these old records scanned and put online for public use. I know that I wasn’t asked for an ID, my name, or even my purpose when I went there, so I imagine that these are freely available for people to see. I can imagine the difficulty, but what if there were a time slider in Google street view?
We need Mechanical Turk for the offline world.
Actually, I was wondering about this just today – whether you could use Mechanical Turk with a higher payout to ask people to go somewhere, check out a public record for viewing, take a hi-res photo, then upload it. I wonder what approximate cost it would take per page to get that going.
In Salt Lake County, Utah, the records ARE online, but you need to pay a monthly fee to access them. If you want to go older than the 1970′s, though, you have to physically go into the city and county building downtown.
In the future, all of this information will be accessible online. I keep getting frustrated waiting for my imagined future to arrive.