OSM user gpriceless and I were working on a section of San Francisco State University that had recently been under construction. The area in question used to be several rows of older buildings and is located just west of the Humanities building on campus. These buildings were torn down to make way for a brand new AstroTurf soccer field and green open space area for students to enjoy. We went to the site with our printed Field Papers atlas to ground truth what we knew had been changed on the campus.

I added a Bicycle Parking point to the east side of the newly added soccer field and another just to the north of the West Campus Green. Since gpriceless had already digitized the West Campus Green and the soccer field, I added the name to the soccer field. The actual features on the ground are very different from the ones on the Bing basemap, and include additional walking paths, sidewalks, benches, and restrooms. I didn’t feel that I would be able to accurately portray these until the basemap was updated, so I did not draw them on the Field Papers atlas. I have never used Field Papers before, and I found it to be fairly simple and user friendly. The two atlases that I created can be seen here: http://fieldpapers.org/snapshot.php?id=6r2r5s7l#18/37.72270/-122.48204 and http://fieldpapers.org/snapshot.php?id=l3nbvlf3#16/37.7238/-122.4797.

SFSUCarto

Although I do not have any previous experience with OpenStreetMap, I found the website fairly easy to use after viewing the tutorial and playing around with the iD Editing Tool. With this knowledge, I was able to add buildings to the San Francisco State University campus. The buildings I added included Greenhouse Number 1, the Early Childhood Education Center, several buildings near Greenhouse Number 2, Buildings B and C in the University Park North residential housing complex. I also added several bike racks to the campus, the Bike Barn bike rental center to the Gymnasium, straightened the building boundaries of a few buildings, tagged and labeled or relabeled buildings, and added the Geography Department’s Map Library to the HSS building. These changes have been recorded in my change log and can be seen here: osm.org/user/dhalli1/history.

I did not have very many difficulties in adding buildings or points to the map, but in the beginning it was difficult for me to remember how to close the editing tool when I was digitizing something, especially an area. Since I had not digitized anything before using OSM, it took me a few tries to get it down, but now I am much more comfortable with adding points and areas.

I did discover that OSM is best used in any modern web browsing platform that is not Internet Explorer. This is because I (accidentally) began editing OSM in IE and found it much more difficult, as it was not running the most current iD editing tools. However, when I switched over to Chrome web browser, the newer version of the iD editing tools popped up and I was able to edit with them much more easily.

SFSUCarto