Here's what I meant by 'external data stores':
Here in the USA, a very small sample, comprising the few utility poles (power, communication, lighting, or combinations), comprising all the poles I have leaned against or otherwise observed over the course of a lifetime, suggests that every damn one of them had at least one, sometimes several, apparently unique identifying numbers or codes, burned in, stamped in, painted on, or nailed on.
The essence of my assertion is that someone went to the trouble of applying some unique identifier to each pole. It follows that somewhere, for each similar set of poles, there exists a record, probably on paper, linking the unique identifiers to other attributes like street address, date of installation, date of last service, inventory of attached equipment, etc.
If your lighting columns are of relatively recent manufacture, the information may be stored electronically, and linked to barcodes instead of physical tags and physical records, or it may be piles of paper records in file boxes in a dusty warehouse, but at least some of the information you seek exists.
I suspect that, at the very least, you've got a list, somewhere, of all the poles to be audited. Getting a copy of that list in modifiable and extensible form would be a good start. That way you can keep track of which poles have been visited and which have not, in addition to keeping track of the audit results.
This would probably be a good time to learn how to build, modify, extend, and maintain a database. Or hire someone to do it.
OR, this is a long shot, but maybe you could crowdsource the work.
I.e., you could ask the citizenry of the city, perhaps just for fun, perhaps for a chance in a drawing for some modest prize, to go out and take a few photos of each nearby lighting pole, one frame showing the serial number, one an overall shot, and one zoomed in to show the condition of the upper end, or whatever you'd like to see.
You'd need to put up a website with a bunch of storage to collect the submissions, and some staff to dig through the haystack, extract the data you need, keep track of progress, issue updates to keep the crowd interested, and highlight the poles still in need of inspection by the crowd or a small followup crew.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA