Using these Pages to Find Information about Properties
Listed on the
National Register of Historic Places

These web pages allow the user to find out more information about properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places using the NPS Focus interface. To find out more about the National Register see www.cr.nps.gov/nr or to find out more about NPS Focus go to http://focus.inside.nps.gov. The presentation you see here is modeled on the “digital library” approach to providing information over the web. These web pages are a “work in progress” because they do not yet contain all National Register listed properties.

Through the use of a simple or an advanced search you can find summary information about National Register properties in the widely used Dublin core metadata format, a standard scheme for characterizing the content of collections. From the summary information you can navigate to the text of a National Register nomination or see the photographs associated with a nomination. Searches may include only one or more than one category connected with “and”, “or”, and “not” operators.

The summary information translates National Register terms to Dublin Core terms. Basic information such as resource name, address, location, and date of listing all appear in the summary information. Many National Register properties are a part of larger groups of nominations sharing a similar context known as multiple nominations and some are even in National Parks. Much of the search capability is contained in the subject and the keyword fields. The subject field is thesaurus-based and includes a number of National Register categories including the type of resource, the criteria under which it was nominated, the periods of significance, the areas of significance and the architectural style, if any. The keyword information contains “free-form” text for searching such as the significant person associated with a property or the significant year something happened or the architect or builder or engineer responsible for construction.

Once you find a property of interest you may view the text and photographs associated with each nomination in one of three ways. If you do not have an image viewer on your computer you may pull up a copy in the JPEG format. For more powerful viewing, including the ability to do searches within the text of the nomination, download the DjVu viewer or the popular Acrobat Reader.