When the Town of Portland, Connecticut, realized they needed up-to-date maps for Town planning and economic development, they devised an innovative plan to digitize their complete set of assessor's maps. Many municipalities don not have the financial or human resources needed to convert maps to a digital format. Portland First Selectman was seeking a novel strategy to accomplish his Town's high-priority mapping project with limited funds. Dave Kuzminski and Ed Yush, advisors for Portland's Town-Tech Educational Partnership Program, offered a unique solution- students from the Town-Tech Program could digitize the maps.

Portland's Town-Tech program was developed so that high school students would have "real-life" opportunities and hands-on experience in local government. Through this parnership, the Town of Portland was able to work with students from the Town-Tech Program to digitize assessor's maps into a customized, Town-wide GIS. Kuzminski, Town-Tech advisor and the Town's Technology Coordinator, was pleased with the project.

Before the digitization project began, the Town-Tech program had available to them a networked computer lab at the high school including a Cal-Comp Drawing Board III digitizing tablet and HP color plotter. The Town-Tech program acquired Esri's Data Automation Kit (DAK) and ArcView GIS software from Marin Environmental, Inc., Haddam, Connecticut. Marin also provided the technical management, training, and quality assurance checking of the digital products. Marin did some checking and found that the Town had accesst o 1:100-scale topographic and planimetric maps from a 12986 flyover in a tiled DXF format. Marin staff converted the 1"=100'-scale digital maps to a seamless, Town-wide of thematic GIS data sets that were used to geographically reference the hard-copy tax maps.

To learn the digital conversion process, three Town-Tech students and two staff members participated in a two-day training course with Marin's GIS specialist, Kim Holden. During the training they learned the DAK software interface and how to digitize and attribute Mylar parcel maps, create map layers, and plot maps for quality control. Marin staff prepared a specialized step-by step procedural manual for the DAK and ArcView GIS software to help the students and staff succeed with their project.

After the training, the students digitized parcel lines form original Mylar maps int a GIS data set and added attribute information- map and lot number- to link assessor's records to the parcel GIS database.

The digitization project has given the Town up-to date GIS capabilities needed to generate multipurpose, dynamic maps. Town officials are using this system in land use planning, tax assessment, and economic development decision making. In addition, local high school students were exposed to a new technology and have gained invaluable hands-on experience in the field of GIS.

While the parcel maps are now digitized, the work is not yet complete. The Town-Tech students are continuing to create new GIS data sets and train new students, and they are planning to digitize the Town's entire set of water and sewer records. They also hope to make the maps accessible to the community via the Interne-if possible, free of charge. For more information about Portland's Town-Tech program and the parcel conversion project, visit www.portland.org/towntech/gis/mapping.htm.