The  FindIt Historic Resource Survey Partnership is a state-wide cultural resource survey program created to help document historic resources throughout Georgia and facilitate their preservation.  The partners include the University of Georgia-College of Environment and Design (UGA-CED), the Georgia Transmission Corporation (GTC), the Georgia State Historic Preservation Office ( Historic Preservation Division (HPD) – Dept. of Community Affairs), the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), public utilities, and Georgia communities.

Housed within the Center for Community Design and Preservation (CCDP), FindIt began as a program in 2002 to provide data to the state by teaching students to identify and document cultural resources. Students are trained to locate historic structures and perform fieldwork including architectural identification, mapping, and data analysis. The program serves as one component of GTC’s environmental review requirement and provides support to the university through the funding of staff positions and graduate assistantships. This partnership creates a student learning experience that is unavailable elsewhere on campus. Students can experience fieldwork first-hand, having surveyed over 60 Georgia counties and cities thus far.

The FindIt program is entirely student-focused, as student workers conduct all field work, data entry, and architectural analysis. FindIt is proud to have provided over 65 assistantships and 130 hourly positions since 2002 as an ongoing effort to promote historic preservation and landscape architecture education. Field survey is a fundamental skill which is only taught abstractly on campus; without the experiential field component provided by the FindIt program. FindIt students are stronger, more desirable candidates for future employers than students without similar field experience.

Cultural resource survey is the first step in the preservation planning process. FindIt has successfully completed over 17 years of survey, adding more than 18,000 resources to Georgia’s Natural, Archaeological, and Historic Resources Geographic Information System (GNAHRGIS) inventory.

The benefits of this program are not limited solely to UGA students, GTC, and  HPD.  Findit has additional stakeholders, including the Georgia Department of Transportation, the Information Technology Outreach Services at UGA's Carl Vinson Institute of Government, and countless local communities and private consultants around the state. FindIt students benefit from this partnership by engaging multiple stakeholders and experiencing regions of the state they may otherwise never visit.

For questions, or for more information about the FindIt program, please reach out to: