How You Can Participate in SurveyLA

To ensure the overall credibility and consistency of a large citywide survey project, the actual survey field work and significance assessments will be made by historic preservation professionals, not by volunteers. Nevertheless, the Office of Historic Resources will be partnering closely with volunteers, students, and community members who can contribute information to the project that will help shape these future survey assessments.

The major fieldwork component of the survey project will not begin until 2009, following the completion of the Historic Context Statement and Pilot Surveys. Community organizations, neighborhood councils, and preservation groups therefore have time to prepare by getting organized.

How to Get Started

The survey project represents not only an opportunity to showcase Los Angeles’ rich architectural heritage, but also an unparalleled opportunity for community organizations to become involved in a positive and enduring citywide initiative.

Here are some ideas on how you and your community may become a part of SurveyLA:

• If you are part of a Certified Neighborhood Council or an established community organization, consider forming a special Historic Preservation Committee that can lead your community’s participation in the project.
• Start an outreach and research effort in your community, paralleling SurveyLA, to begin identifying key properties and areas that may warrant further evaluation. While professional architectural historians are likely to identify resources with obvious architectural significance, they are less likely to know resources that may be have historic, social and cultural significance. 
• Begin thinking about how your community group might “surface” some of the less-than-obvious historically significant resources in your area. As you learn more about your community’s heritage, consider how best to tell the story (through research, written narrative, and visual images) of why these resources might be significant.
• To help you in this effort, think about the following questions: What places served as focal points of your community over the years? Which resources were associated with the most important individuals and groups that shaped your community’s history? Which buildings and structures may have been associated with important architects, builders and designers whose work helped define the character of your area? What resources shaped social movements and the cultural evolution of your community? Which sites and areas provide a key window into understanding the demographic changes that your community experienced over the years? Written information that helps answers these questions will prove invaluable to the survey teams that will be conducting local field surveys.
• Put out a call for historic photographs, leading to a digital library of images on your community’s history.
• Conduct oral history interviews with longtime residents of the area, focusing on the evolution of the built environment in your community.
• Develop a contact list of key, knowledgeable people on your community's history.
• Direct community members to this web site and the MyhistoricLA Historic Resource Identification Form.

To volunteer with the OHR on SurveyLA, click here.