Public Education and Awareness Award to Ohio Department of Transportation's Office of Environmental Services, Division of
Information Technology and Office of Strucutrual Engineering for creation of the Buckeye Assets Web Site.
The Ohio Department of Transportation Office of Environmental Services is raising public awareness by taking a federally mandated historic bridge
assessment and inventory beyond what is required by regulations and making information available to the public in a user friendly format. Their development
of the buckeyeassets.org web site allows visitors to not only view the distribution and historic status of pre-1960 Ohio bridges, it provides detailed
structural information, multiple photographs, historic contexts, and printable color reports about each bridge.
The map-based and user-friendly web site contains an inventory of over 8,000 structures that have been inventoried and evaluated using National Register of
Historic Places eligibility criteria. The website features ODOT-inspected structures as well as privately owned and non-vehicular bridges. ODOT believed
that capturing all historic structures within the state is important to Ohio's engineering heritage and infrastructure development.
Another feature that sets ODOT's website and data records apart from other states' inventories is its comprehensive evaluations, established by a committee
of members from ODOT, the Ohio Historic Preservation Office and the Federal Highway Administration staff, which explain why structures in the inventory do
or do not meet National Register criteria. Pre-1960 structures determined not historic are also searchable and can be displayed in the data search.
Providing the identification of significant elements and locations of these resources is an important tool in helping to preserve them. This project will
help channel efforts to focus on the most significant and rare or depleted types of bridges.
Through this website, ODOT has centralized and presented to the public information about all historic bridge structures within the state, a valuable set of
data on Ohio's engineering heritage and infrastructure development.
Click
here
to return to the list of 2009 Ohio Historic Preservation Office Award recipients.
Click
here
for a list of past Ohio Historic Preservation Office Award recipients.
|
