If you have any interest in historic aerial photography, then please read this and I encourage any feedback you have.

The APSRS (Aerial Photography Summary Record System) database is a rich compilation of past American air photo flight projects that occurred prior to 1995.  The database was released on CD in 1996 through the government documents depository program, and uses a proprietary query interface.  The query system is no longer compatible with modern 64-bit computers and operating systems, but last year using an old laptop, I was able to extract what I believe are all 2,793,826 records.  The records include lat/long coordinates that approximate project extents, based on corners of the 7.5 minute USGS grid, as well as limited project descriptions and dates.  I have converted all the data to a GeoPackage file that is approx. 800 MB in size.  

If you aren't familiar with the APSRS, here is a description from the CD User's Manual (Section 2):

Additionally, here's the USGS Product Spec sheet.

Note, if you google APSRS, Google thinks you are really looking for the ASPRS, a society, so the first few hits may cause confusion.

When I first looked at the data, I was dismayed by the number of errant points.  After spending some more time with the data, however, I believe a large portion of the errors can be cleaned without too much difficulty.  It's still too early to estimate how much time it might take though.

Questions I have:

Are the APSRS data still valuable to anyone?  Personally, I have used it already in the past 6 months or so to help people looking for what photos might exist for certain locations at certain points in time.  So I think there is still value, but I would like to hear from others. 

Has anyone else already migrated the data into a currently usable format somewhere?  If so, please share the details.

Has anyone cleaned the errors and missing data?  I am primarily concerned with location errors, so that when querying by location, you can count on getting reliably accurate results.  I have found that there are typos in the lat/long coordinates, and errors in the location text field (state or description) that do not correlate with the lat/longs.   So far, I've cleaned NC, SC, VA, WV, and KY, and they took a couple of hours each.  CA has by far the most errant points.

Basically, I'm trying to decide what to do and where to go next with this, and would welcome input.  I would also really welcome any volunteers who would like to help clean the data, if we go that route.  I am willing to share the data with anyone who has an interest in using the data or working on cleaning, as long as it's not re-sold.  I'm also concerned about versioning, if there's more cleaning done, so we have to be careful about that.

Here are some screenshots:

FIPS field coded for North Carolina - one typo puts point at Toronto, cluster coded for NC should be TN, cluster in VA I'm not sure about

FIPS field coded for West Virginia - typos in FIPS field, WA instead of WV

FIPS field coded for California - many points outside of CA

Thank you very much,

Jeff Essic