Scan Jose Bridges New Technology With Historical Information

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Grab your smartphone and get ready to learn about the history of San Jose!

Thanks to a Library Services and Technology Act grant and about a year's worth of hard work, we've created three walking tours of downtown San Jose that you can take using your smartphone and your feet!

Go to www.scanjose.org to see images from our California Room Collection while standing at the locations that the photographs were taken. Think of it as a time machine in the palm of your hand!

There are three tours to choose from:
A Walk Around the Plaza - takes you on a loop around Plaza de Cesar Chavez
Tragedies and Calamities - a no holds barred look at some of the tragic events in San Jose history
Old Santa Clara Street - highlights some of the great architecture that has sprung up and come down over the years.

Don't have a smartphone? Come join us on September 10th at 11:30 for a group tour using smartphones and iPads to take A Walk Around the Plaza! We will meet in front of the Art Museum - 110 S. Market Street. I'll be there and I hope you will too!

Posted by Sandra Stewart on Aug 12, 2011 | Comments: 2 |

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Comments from our readers...

Group tour of the ScanJose project Saturday morning (Sep 10)

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, September 10.

found out about this "group" walking tour through an email I received as a member of the San Jose Library Foundation. Got a couple of my friends to come with me. None of us have smart phones or tablets, so it was really nice to be able to have some ScanJose project members with iPads walk us to the various sites and share the images. It was really cool. Having lived in San Jose all my life, I actually remember some of the downtown buildings from my childhood that are no longer there. I really hope that ScanJose will make PDFs of Tours 2 and 3 because the network connections downtown made accessing the web sites a little problematic; using the PDFs circumvents the slow network connections. All-in-all, an enjoyable excursion into the local history of my hometown :-)

Thanks!

Submitted by Sandra Stewart on Mon, September 12.

Thanks for your great comments. We will probably get some pdf's for tours 2 and 3 up in the next week or two. We had a good turnout for the event and everyone seemed to have a good time. Lots of good feedback for the app too!