Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.
Female Speaker: Okay, thank you, everybody.
Our next speaker is David Woodcock.
David is a longtime professor of architecture at Texas A&M,
and a founding director of their Center for Heritage Conservation,
serving there from 1991 until 2007.
He was named a distinguished professor by the Association
of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in 1991 and a fellow
of the American Institute of Architects in 1992,
as well as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2004.
David was born in England and attended the University
of Manchester, where he received both a professional degree
in architecture and a diploma in Town and Country Planning.
He taught at the University of Manchester and at the Kent Institute
of Art & Design in Canterbury, England.
He was awarded the Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Architecture
at Texas A&M University, and after four years,
was appointed to the architecture faculty,
becoming a full professor in 1976.
His teaching and research are in the area of heritage conservation,
the adapted use of existing buildings
and places, and sustainability.
Professor Woodcock had an active preservation practice in Canterbury
and was a registered architect in the state of Texas from 1982
to 2005, and continues to undertake consulting work
on building rehabilitation and preservation planning.
He received the Harley J. McKee Award for outstanding service
and was inducted into the College of Fellows in 2004.
His professional service also includes a term as president
of the Association for Preservation Technology International
and chairmanship of the American Institute
of Architects Historic American Buildings Survey Coordinating
Committee, a joint committee of the AIA National Parks Service
and the Library of Congress, and vice-chair of the Advisory Group
of the AIA Historic Resources Committee,
which he will chair in 2009.
But even prior to his work for HABS here on the coordinating committee,
David's name was well-known to all of us at HABS for his leadership
in the teaching of HABS drawing standards and guidelines.
Through the center that he helped to create,
he and his colleagues have worked with students to produce
over 60 sets of drawings for the HABS collection,
nine of which have been recognized by the Peterson Prize.
David's talk today is entitled, "Reading Buildings:
The Role of Documentation in Education and Practice."
Please welcome David Woodcock.   [ Applause ]
David Woodcock: Thank you very much for that very generous introduction.
I guess the first slide's going to come up when I press something.
There we go, thank you.
So yes, "Reading Buildings: The Role of Documentation
in Education and Practice."
This is, in some ways, I hope a sort of serendipitous connection
between the three extraordinarily wonderful presentations we heard
this morning and the afternoon sessions, which are going to sort
of move us from the history of HABS to the future of HABS
and where we might be going.
My thesis, really, is that research and investigation
in architecture is really very parallel
to research in any other field.
This is a point I have to keep making on a regular basis
to my academic institution.
Universities are not entirely sure why architecture is sometimes even
in a university setting at all,
being a sort of modified trade school,
but the idea that I am promoting, and promote on a regular basis,
is that, like all researchers, we observe things, we observe phenomena
and objects, we make hypotheses about what might
or might not have happened, we gather data, we analyze,
and we draw conclusions, and in the case of preservation architects,
we act upon those conclusions and hopefully get things better.
So, within the profession of architecture, gathering data
through the process of documenting, that is, the meticulous measuring
and drawing of existing structures, has always played a role
in the development of architectural thought
and of the training of its practitioners.
Historically, architecture has always been a subject for written
as well as built records.
The Roman architect Vitruvius, whose theoretical discussion on the nature
of architecture, The Ten Books on Architecture, may best be remembered
for his tri-part identification of firmness, commodity,
and delight as the characteristics of well-building,
or good architecture; it's in his chapters on aesthetics, however,
that the greater impact on the form
of what we now call classical architecture might have been said
to rest.
It's notable that Vitruvius, generally regarded as a dense
and rather obscure writer, was constrained
to explain architecture only in words.
We had a little discussion from Professor Larkin today about that,
sort of, where the words and drawings
and pictures are part of the same issue.
As the English architect Sir John Soane noted, "If the noble
and useful arts of engraving and printing had been known
to the Greeks and Romans, what treasures we would now possess.
Vitruvius would not have been left to his commentators,
and we should have had his full thinking."
A reminder, indeed, that architecture needs to be experienced
through the senses, especially that of vision,
and not just examined in words.
The development of Renaissance architecture was based
on the careful measurement and analysis of the actual work
of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Here is an example of Andrea Palladio,
whose Les Quatre Livres de l'Architecture of 1550 draws
on his study of actual monuments.
He notes, "There was not the least of any ancient structure
that had any merit in it, but what I went and examined,
to see if anything was to be learned from it, and if,
with utmost diligence, to measure every one of its parts."
You can almost hear him panting with the same enthusiasm
that Camille Wells was talking about this morning.
The availability of written and illustrated treaties
on architecture were sources for the New World, just as they were
for what is famously referred to as Old Europe, and not least,
for our founding father, the architect
and president Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson's familiarity with the 1721 Leoni edition of Palladio,
which we just looked at, was --   he based these later designs
on the Living-Learning Buildings along the lawn, and this one,
the 1818 design of Pavilion V at the University of Virginia.
Indeed, as you all know, the whole Academical Village
at Charlottesville design drew heavily on his scholarship,
and it remains, in a sense, the ultimate model
of an academic institution, whose physical presence was designed
to instruct, as well as to inspire its occupants.
We heard this morning a little bit of the Beaux Arts system.
The educational system called the Beaux Arts was based on the value
of learning by observation, necessity of skills in drawing
for communication, and a concomitant appreciation and understanding
of construction practice, not simply a method
of understanding historical precedent, reflected in this drawing
by Reginald Cordingley, who was my major professor
at the University of Manchester.
Many architects of the modern movement have claimed
to have little interest in the past; however, Le Corbusier's association
with stark modernist design should not be separated, I believe,
from the record of his travels in Tuscany in 1907,
which produced a magnificent series of sketches,
many with careful notes and dimensions.
His seminal work on the Modulor is a further example of his passion
to measure in all things, and it makes an interesting parallel
with the Renaissance interest in modules
as guides for harmonious design.
Drawing from life, then, from the real object,
is a method of learning, as well as recording,
as much for the architect as it is for the artist.
Having established that observation and drawing
and measuring are the heart of architectural enquiry,
how should that shape the formal education of aspiring architects?
Well, "Dispatches from the Field" by Camille
in this morning's session prompted me, in fact, to think ahead
and begin with the first person.   So here I am, in the beginning.
The architectural education at the University of Manchester
when I was there, more years ago now than I care to remember,
was based on regular assignments to observe
and record architectural elements and assemblies.
Drawing required critical examination, meticulous levels
of craftsmanship in pencil and ink on handmade papers.
Drawing existing work, referred to by my mentor, Ronald Brunskill,
as "designing backwards", persuaded us that drawing was the natural tool
for examining ideas and taught us the technical nature of plans,
sections, and three-dimensional representation.
This 1764 fireplace at Platt Hall --
the field notes were created on grid system,
and the final drawing was delineated in pencil
on very expensive Whatman Paper.
The analysis, however, led to the greater appreciation of the skills
of the builders and understanding of their technology.
Later work in the field in this remote 13th century farmhouse,
called Hafoty, listed as the oldest house on the Welsh island
of Anglesey, made the target not to be missed,
even if it was long-abandoned, and with floors too angled
for comfortable repose, forcing my companion
and I to sleep in a tent for a week.
The experience, however, was worth the effort,
because in recording the great central fireplace
with its 10-foot opening, seven feet in height,
we found ourselves literally face-to-face
with a craftsman from the 1200s.
Some thirty years after my own experience in Wales,
British architect Caroline Mauduit, writing in her 1988 travelogue,
An Architect in Italy, notes the unique value of drawing
and measuring, which you may read for yourselves.
Connecting with the real world was a real problem,
as I discovered during my years in teaching at Texas A&M University,
and by 1977, I had become really troubled by a lack of connection
between the classroom and the studio and the reality of construction,
and I turned to the HABS program as a connection to my own training,
perhaps, as a way of introducing the students of Texas A&M,
the graduate students I was working with, to the reality of building.
The pedagogical intent was to instill a curiosity
for understanding construction, using historic construction
as a formula, a curiosity that requires the indignity of crawling
under buildings, into attics, and to develop skills
in field documentation that require judgment on what to record,
as well as the skill of how to record it, and the ability
to analyze and interpret evidence, as represented
by the subject buildings.
Finally, since most of our teams include graduate students
from several degree programs across the university, the recording
and understanding of a building provides a rare,
genuine team experience within an academic setting, developing a kind
of dialogue and trust that is essential
in trans-disciplinary practice.   Two case studies may serve
to demonstrate the range of learning experiences.
And in this, again, you will get Camille Wells's
"What does the building want to tell us?"
motto shining fairly strongly.
This is the Giddings-Wilkin House in Brenham, Texas.
It has a Texas marker outside, dating the building to 1843.
Now, you may not be terribly familiar with Texas,
but I can tell you that in 1843,
this kind of building was not in existence at all.
Three years before Texas became independent from Mexico, 1843,
buildings did not look like this.
Its current appearance is clearly much later.
We were fortunate in the fact that this flat roof was subject
to a major storm, and whereas the owners of the building,
who were the local heritage society, had spent a great deal
of money re-wallpapering the lower parts of the building,
they forget before they did that, it would have been good to go
and inspect the roof, which leaked like a sieve.
So we had one of our Texas hurricanes with a major storm,
and all the wallpaper ended up on the floor,
giving us a wonderful opportunity to read the changes made over time.
Evidence of condition was the discussion that came
up over a lunch table today, and here is evidence of condition.
You may not be able to read this [unintelligible],
though they're quite good on the screen.
There are painted ghosts; because the wallpaper had gone,
we were able to see the painted surfaces underneath.
And obviously there's something going on here -- a staircase --
and a very strange thing is happening here,
and here is two pieces of the edge of what appeared to be an opening,
with the remnants of the paint that was perhaps where --
on one side and then the other side?
So how did we, in fact, develop an understanding of that?
Well, we used the HABS tradition.
We documented the building thoroughly.
And the central hall clearly indicated that this staircase
over here, which was the original staircase,
first of all miraculously finished
at what was now the inside wall of the hallway.
Clearly, the staircase really wanted to go over there.
But at some point in its history, the hallway was enclosed,
the staircase was moved to the other side of the hall --
that's the paint fragment that we were looking at a little earlier --
and then, at an even later part in life,
I'm sure Mrs. Wilkin was the mover and shaker in making the change,
much in the way as my dear wife, Valerie, is the mover and shaker
of change in my household.
She said, "My dear, the stair is terribly old; we should replace it
with a spanking new wonderful modern stair," so they did.
But in order to put that stair in, behold, the door,
which originally was opposite this door, and fit nicely
under that stair, didn't fit anymore.
And so the door got moved over here, and we found when we went
to the dining room, the door was, indeed, moved over there,
and then, that's what happened.
All those boards were taken off, the doors moved over, and we were able
to discern what it was that had happened
over time in that particular room.
So, examining the cross-section of the building,
which looks like this -- and you can see why a roof leak would be a
serious problem -- we began to look at elements of this floor down here
and discovered strange things happening on the boards.
We won't go back on the slides, because I want to stay on time here,
but a lot of the boards
at this level beyond this point are clearly new, which would indicate
that the original house had a floor level at that level.
There was an upstairs loft -- we sort of heard about one of those,
the sleeping loft upstairs --
and, indeed, that probably was the 1843 house.
The set of drawings that were produced for this building,
the Giddings-Wilkin House, I am proud to say,
was one of our Peterson winners, and we actually had a series of eight
of these little diagrams on one sheet, which showed the development
of the building over time.
And, of course, we were familiar with other buildings in Texas,
which had this -- and yes, we do call it dogtrot --
have that little dogtrot facility in there.
And there was correspondence from J.D. Giddings, the original builder
of the house, where he talked about his new home
as having a dogtrot space in it.
So we were fairly comfortable that we'd hit
on a good piece of evidence.
The next building that I'm going to talk
about is Grimes County Courthouse.
It was built in 1894; it's the third building of its kind on that site.
Documentation, when we started looking at it --
this is, as you can see, a relatively old photograph,
judging by the cars -- the documentation of the second floor,
which has a very large courtroom on the upper level,
reached only by one stair, although there is an external stair.
All of those are wood; therefore, the whole thing meets nobody's code
of any kind whatsoever,
and the restrooms are actually approached by a step.
You have to sort of go up a throne-like up to a little step
up here, so that doesn't meet anyone's code, either --
but this courtroom is very large.
The roof, as you can see from the indented areas on the plan here --
this is a sort of raised area -- but there appears to be,
when you start looking at it, a trussed beam, which carries the load
of the floor over that area.
This section, which is a glorious drawing -- this was actually,
in 1989, this was the last set of drawings, roughly, I think,
that we actually did by hand, but it's a beautiful set of drawings,
and when we started again looking at it, we discovered, yes,
there indeed is this deep truss.
We were concerned at one point that this might have been a truss
that was this deep, but then we realized
that this thing is only sort of scabbed on here,
so this lower level piece down here is sort of very flimsy,
and there was one dreadful occasion, I'm afraid,
when going up with the county commissioners
to show them some damage that you will see in a moment,
I actually put my foot through there,
because one of the commissioners was smoking, and I suggested
that was a bad plan, and he told me exactly,
in words of one syllable, "Mind my own business."
But that's the seating of this truss in the corner
of Grimes County Courthouse.
It's an indented corner, so we get a valley running
down in this direction, a great deal of water collects here,
a lot of rot had developed in this corner --
you can see that there were signs of a chimney here
that probably had leaked a good deal of material.
We won't go into the air conditioning that had been shoved
into the building in a very inappropriate fashion.
This is the offending floor through which Woodcock's foot trod,
but this is the corner that we were really concerned about,
and when we started looking again at this truss system going over here,
we were examining this corner -- the corner over here was even worse --
we actually were asked -- pointed out to the county commissioners,
and the condition assessment became a part of what we were doing,
even though it wasn't a part of our original plan.
The deterioration at the end of the truss,
combined with lateral movement at the top of the walls,
due to the roof being covered with three layers
of bituminous shingle instead of the original light metal shingles shown
on the turn of the century photograph,
was causing serious problems.   So the recording of the roof plan
and the truss connection prompted emergency repairs
that probably saved the roof system.   Pat Sparks is now one
of the nation's young leading preservation engineers,
and he still talks about the value of this 1989 recording experience --
actually, as recently as last week, when he came to talk
to my graduate class on preservation technology --
and he still remembers, with varying degrees of fondness, the difficulty
of measuring Grimes County Courthouse.
I am happy to say that the courthouse later received grant
support for a complete restoration of the exterior
to its 1912 appearance, and an interior rehabilitation
that has allowed the building to continue in its original use
by the installation of an elevator and properly appropriate restrooms.
So, what are the outcomes, then, of these kinds of experiences?
Well, it's my belief, and I'm really preaching to the choir,
that students with HABS experience have immediate professional skills.
They may actually contribute knowledge, just as they did
at Grimes County in a very practical way,
and at the Giddings-Wilkin House in a more theoretical way,
to explain the development of the building over time.
Certainly to increase the range of recording techniques
and to produce drawings for a variety of purposes:
archival drawings; supportive education, of course;
and as the basis for actual repair and restoration.
Testaments to the value of recording as a part of the education
of an architect abound, although few schools have chosen
to make this experience mandatory, an issue which is of great pain
to me, and one that, as a member
of the AIA Historic Resources Committee,
we constantly are trying to do something about.
It is something of an uphill battle, but we are battling on.
So, recording technology.   One of the things that was discussed
in the very last presentation before lunch was the business
of actually coming to grips with the reality
of the building, up close and personal.
I think it's generally accepted
that hand-measuring provides the basis for all other methods.
Though we may have more sophisticated measuring devices now,
not all of them can operate in close quarters, and when they get
into really close quarters --   and I was very pleased to hear
that the Montezuma Castle drawings are part of the exhibit
down on the third floor today; I was actually shoved by my students
into the lowest level of Montezuma Castle and left there
for quite a long time, "until I'd done it properly," as they said.
Photography -- of course we're all familiar
with how quickly photography came into the picture of being able
to record buildings, and we saw some beautiful examples
of those this morning and in the exhibit
that we're going to see later today.
Standard film, of course, which is still important,
but becoming harder to find.
Rectified photography, aerial photography,
and of course today's use of digital photography.
This was a fairly interesting use
of a rectified photograph taken rather precariously from the top
of a step ladder of a shingle roof of a triple-warped building
in the Cabot House in Wheelock, TX.
And this is the tracing of the rectified photograph to the scale
of the final drawing in the days when we still did drawings by hand
in that, as has been said, repediograph,
which is an ill-named tool.
Photogrammetry [phonetic] had its beginnings for military use
in the 1850s in France and is now also software-driven and is sort
of an invaluable tool to us.
Traditional surveying equipment has always played a part in HABS work.
This is a piece of photogrammetry documentation of Montezuma Castle.
The difficulty of measuring here is that the floor is 60 feet
down below this level, and the photograph
of the poor soul measuring was actually measuring in a room that's
under here, and the building goes up five floors
and has a total of 20 rooms.   It's quite an astonishing document.
One of the things that, as an aside, I showed you that little drawing
of the piece on the fireplace from Wales, from a 1200 craftsman.
When I was down there, I found a petroglyph down there from about
that same period, and it was quite fascinating to come sort
of face-to-face again with the reality of who builds things.
Brings hair up on the back of my neck, thinking about it.
Total station surveying is, as you all know,
basically traditional surveying equipment on steroids,
but it certainly eased our study of the Seward Plantation
at Independence, TX, and this revealed some interesting cultural
history as well, because, again, we heard discussion about the value
of HABS as a record of cultural as well as physical history.
The building here, which is the Seward Plantation home itself,
was one of the first buildings documented in Texas in 1934.
These log buildings, which existed back here,
were all built by enslaved people.   They were all log structures.
This was a double cabin.   This was another slave cabin here.
These were photographed
but generally ignored in terms of drawings.
They were not thought worthy of drawing, and, in fact,
they didn't have a whole site plan.
They had an immediate plan of the house,
but that was about all it was.
When we did our site plan here, we were able, by aerial photographs
and by some examination of the historical records,
to discover that the original road ran through here,
but Mr. Seward was actually a road commissioner, and when they decided
to straighten the road, he decided he wanted it farther away
from his house.
Fortunately, he owned this land as well, so the new road goes
down here, but you can still see remnants of that,
and the trees were originally on opposite sides of the street.
It's kind of an interesting piece of cultural history,
again, of a different kind.
Total station theodolites, of course, record XYZ coordinates.
They are an extraordinary documentary technique,
and one of the things we discussed at our meeting yesterday was how to,
in fact, record this kind of information, but the mathematics
of surveying have not changed.   It's just that the equipment has.
And this is the latest tool, the latest toy, some would argue,
but nevertheless, a tool that is invaluable.
Elizabeth Louden, who is in the audience from Texas Tech,
pioneered the use of this, I think, for the National Park Service
when she documented the Statue of Liberty with her students
from Texas Tech, an extraordinary task that was clearly not possible
to be done by hand, and we certainly are finding it is a very useful tool
on sites that are either inaccessible, as was the Statue
of Liberty, or dangerous, as this particular site was.
This is the D-Day landing site in France, between Omaha
and Utah Beaches, known as Pointe Du Hoc.
A very, very difficult site, and really important to measure.
Hand drawing, however, provides the index for all of these drawings
that we do with other documents.
So, without the hand documentation, without the basic understanding
of what you're dealing with, 3-D laser scanning just provides you
with thousands and thousands and thousands of XYZ coordinates
that are not inappropriately referred to as a point cloud,
because the density of the cloud sometimes defies one's ability
to understand it.
While 3-D laser scanning can be applied at both large
and small scales, we are now looking at the Moire Pattern transformation;
it is being explored here to deal with things
like very low profile carvings, or petroglyphs.
This is the result of a PhD thesis directed by Bob Warden,
who is the new director of the Center for Heritage Conservation,
and another doctoral student is working
on expanding this for field use.
Two new documents that came from the Getty Conservation Institute this
year provide an excellent overview of available
and appropriate technology.
And one of the things that I would stress in our teaching programs,
certainly, is that we're always looking for appropriate technology.
Just because we own a 3-D laser scanner, and it's a very nice tool,
and it's very clever to take it out, if you can be out there
with a tape measure and a pencil and get the same --
the needed amount of information, there's no need to use the big toys.
Robin Letellier's book on guiding principles is the first volume,
which describes the various approaches to documentation
and the techniques that you can use, and the second volume,
by Rand Eppich, provides some illustrated examples
from across the globe.
So, in recording and education, what are we doing?
Well, whatever the technology, the most effective educational aspect
of the HABS program, to me,
remains active learning and discovery learning.
That is to say, the student is actually put in a position
of being asked to undertake a task -- "Come back to me, please,
with a set of documents
that describe this building you are looking at" --
and hopeful always that they will describe some
of its cultural history.
I am also hopeful that they'll describe some of its history
over time: how has the building grown, how has it changed?
And these philosophies, of course, are much discussed
by Jean Piaget [phonetic] and John Dewey.
Learning, then, comes as a result of responding to challenge,
even if the challenge is not fully appreciated
when the student first goes out on site.
And even I can remember, old though I am, of the times when I went
out on site and thought, "My Lord, how do I even begin to do this?"
But confidence is one of the things that you build.
Confidence is one of the things that I think is important
to discover about yourself.   And the HABS Program provides that.
Now, recording and practice may be a slightly different thing.
There we deal with: what do I need to know, how am I going to find it,
and how will I share it with the team?
Well, that may be very similar to the educational goals for recording.
They may be broad and for the practitioner,
the data is always a prerequisite for analysis
and a proposal for action.
However, as for the student, as the remote technology
of data collection increasingly removes the decision maker
from the object being studied the need for reliable information,
transfer, and the effective trans-disciplinary communication
becomes more critical.
Some of you may recognize this group from Vertical Access, providing,
literally, hands-on experiences which most
[laughter] So, education and practice.
While the Kentucky School for the Blind image is one
that keeps repeating, it's hard to describe the history of HABS
without coming up with this 1934 document
with these wonderful gentlemen in their hats, and their ties,
looking very professional.
The other collection of folk are, of course, playing with the new toy,
although I have to say that most of the documentation they had finished
that weekend was done in more traditional ways with squared paper
and tape measures, although the tape measure is now enhanced
with a measuring device like this that uses a laser pointer
and produces a dimension without having somebody at the other end.
But this little group is busily working on this house,
unlike this one, which is, again, sort of an image
of the old HABS looking for the ground buildings.
This is a building that, in all probability,
in the words of Charles Peterson, will disappear
into unrecorded oblivion except for the result of this little group
of people over here who will now have recorded it.
And I think that experience is extraordinarily wonderful for them.
Incidentally, that group includes five civil engineers,
one anthropologist, and a bunch of architects.
I'm very proud of the fact that our program
at Texas A&M is genuinely trans-disciplinary.
And, if you want to find some really good preservation engineers,
A&M's the place to look.
So, education in practice is trying to do a lot of things.
It is an important role that we have to play.
HABS is a key portion of that.
The AIA Historic Resources Committee that you've heard about before,
we have an education initiative that's encouraged the accrediting
process to require an understanding of the preservation process
for all people graduating with a professional degree in architecture.
That requirement is now in place.
But, as I said earlier, it doesn't include field experience.
Most significantly, this oldest standing committee
of the AIA stresses that principles of good architecture,
Vitruvius' well building, are universal and timeless,
and that conservation and an understanding
of the past is an integral part of the discipline of architecture,
and connects the old with the new,
as with this remarkable recent addition
to Mr. Jefferson's Virginia State Capital.
The personal experience
of documentation forces an actual change
of attitude towards existing buildings,
and towards the creation of new ones.
It seems critical to me
that professionals must see themselves both as curators,
as well as creators, and not to be tied to the past,
but to understand it, to care for it, to build upon it.
In essence, like the recording team at Mrs. Sam Houston's House
in Independence, Texas, to see ourselves as a part of the continuum
of history embodied in this very cunning compilation
of a 19th century photograph
and 21st century images taken by one of my students.
The doctoral student -- sorry -- the doctoral student down here,
who has actually worked on that Murray Patton [phonetic] stuff,
he had us stand on the porch.   And we weren't quite sure why we --
I said, "Well, I could stand, you know, over here."
He said, "No, don't.
Don't. No, I don't want you standing there."
He said, "Would you take a picture of me?"
And I said, "Yes, you can stand here."
And he said, "No I want you to take a picture
of me sitting on the step."
I had no idea what was going on until this picture appeared.
And so there we are with some early occupants
of Mrs. Sam Houston's House, all together, sharing the experience
of the past and being, at the same time, part of the future.
As an educator, it's my belief
that the Historic American Building Survey can be the reinforcement
that links the past with the future.
HABS also develops critical thinking skills.
Every time I talk to professionals about what they want from students,
it's critical thinking skills.
It provides training in trans-disciplinary communication
and it builds that terribly important personal confidence
that helps to ease the transition between the academy and practice.
Vitruvius and Palladio laid the foundation.
Lester Holland [phonetic] and Charles Peterson,
as we've heard, provided a mechanism.
And 75 years of HABS have built a remarkable record and a tradition
that links the past with the future.
I'm confident that HABS will continue to enrich our knowledge
and our understanding of our built heritage
and provide an invaluable link between education and practice.
Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]
Female Speaker: Thank you very much, David.
I think that photograph gives a whole new meaning
to Camille's [phonetic] Fourth Dimension.
[laughter] Okay, our next speaker is Anne Weber.
Anne is a senior associate with Farewell Mills and Gatsch Architects
in Princeton, New Jersey.
Anne holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and applied science
from Yale University, a Master's in Architecture, as well as a Master's
in historic preservation from Columbia University.
And rounding out her education in historic preservation,
Miss Weber attended Britain's Attingham Summer School.
In addition, she holds a NCARB certificate and is licensed
as an architect in New York, as well as in New Jersey.
Her current practice consists primarily of the management
of large-scale institutional historic preservation projects.
Miss Weber's projects include the restoration
of the Essex County Courthouse,
the Princeton University Chapel, and Newark City Hall.
She also develops planning documents,
such as the preservation plan for Kahn's Trenton Bath Houses,
assessment of the buildings and landscape
at the landmark Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington,
and a coding addition study for Nassau Hall at Princeton University.
Miss Weber is a member of the Board of the Association
for Preservation Technology International, and a co-chair
of their Publications Committee.
She also serves on the boards of the Historical Society of Princeton
and the Princeton Battlefield Society.
And prior to her current position,
Anne worked for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
and private architectural firms in Virginia and Mississippi.
And from the standpoint of HABS, Anne bears the distinction
of having received the very first Charles E. Peterson prize
for the best set of student-produced measured drawings to HABS standards
in 1983 and singlehandedly produced 28 sheets of drawings
of Mulford House in East Hampton, New York,
setting quite a high standard for future submissions.
I'm sure they all appreciate that one.
[laughter] But the set was hand-measured,
as well as hand-drawn.
Since then, Anne has become well versed in drawing technologies,
including laser scanning, and is therefore familiar
with the full range of drawing experiences.
The title of Anne's talk today is, "Are HABS Drawing Standards viable
in 21st century architectural practice?"
Please welcome Anne Weber.   [ Applause ]
Anne Weber: Well, thank you very much, Katherine.
That was a lovely introduction.
And in answer to that question, I'd kind of like to just say, "Yes,"
and let you all go return your phone calls, and --
[laughter] But I think I see my son's history teacher sitting
out there.
He says, "You have to justify your answer," and "I'd need
at least two paragraphs."
So, at least they're going to be illustrated.
David has succinctly identified the questions
of the practitioner as, "What do I need to know?
How am I going to find it?
And how will I share it with the team?"
With the realities of project budgets and making a living,
we need to be very efficient in answering these questions.
The viability of HABS standards and practice,
unfortunately must be evaluated in dollars and cents.
And we need to be very mindful of what is the appropriate technology
so that we can survive in the economy.
Recording structures and sites
with HABS measured drawings is not just a set of rules for drafting,
it's a comprehensive process for documentation that is intertwined
with photography and history.
Initially developed for hand drafting and buildings of the 18th
and early 19th centuries, they've been updated
to include procedures more appropriate to later structures.
They've also been updated to include advances in equipment
and technology, such as photogrammetry
and electronic survey equipment like Total Station,
which David just talked about.
I'm not going to talk about Total Station,
because in practice architects hire people to do surveying.
So, I did learn how to do it, but haven't done it in many years.
Guidelines are also provided for CAD drawings
and the standards can be applied with other modern technologies
like laser scanning and LIDAR --
stands for Light Detection and Ranging.
The strength of the standards, really,
is that they ensure consistency between drawings produced
by many hands over many years, allowing the researchers
and analysts to rely on the accuracy of the information in order
to make comparisons and to draw conclusions.
As a process for documentation, the standards are still viable
because documentation is still important.
David has identified its role in education
and it is a significant part of architectural practice as well,
whether for a basis for construction work or for studies
such as a historic structure report.
We use the HABS collection extensively in our own work
for architectural and historical comparative analysis, for models
and precedents for historic detailing, and for base drawings
for restoration and construction work.
We would like to see the collection continue to expand,
and we need to resolve to give back by contributing documentation
of significant sites, even sites which are less significant.
So, I will look at the documentation methods that we use in practice,
how they may or may not meet the standards, and where we might head
from the point of view of practice
to make it more integrated with HABS.
The first method, of course, that we use probably more
than any other is the standard "Interns with Tape Measures."
And I'm not going to show you pictures of that
because you probably all know what that looks like.
You've probably all even done it.
So, moving beyond the traditional hand-drafting and measuring,
photogrammetry was really the first advance using single or stereo pairs
of photographs to provide detailed documentation of large
and complex facades and details.
Today there are many thriving businesses
that provide photogrammic documentation services saving
architectural firms substantial time over sending out teams
with tape measures and pads.
Photogrammetry has been in use for at least 25 years
for building documentation and was used at the New Jersey State House
in the mid-1980s to document the building facades
and the Legislative Chamber elevations.
Many of the building facades were inaccessible, even with lifts,
because of roof and light well configurations.
This documentation process illustrated some of the pitfalls
of photogrammetry, which does depend upon the skill of the operator,
both in taking the photos and in creating the drawings.
The initial drawings for the exterior were created
by a firm oriented more towards using photogrammetry
for civil engineering and for mapping.
Because of their lack of familiarity with buildings there were not able
to select the appropriate lines to draw from the photographs.
The drawings had to be heavily corrected by our architectural team
which was working to HABS standards to document details
and plans throughout the building.
The interior documentation was done by another firm that specialized
in architectural documentation, Danham Musik Ryan [phonetic]
from Iowa, and so the drawing process went much more smoothly.
This is an image from a negative that was made --
I mean this is when we had eight by 10 negatives, and we used cameras,
and you blew them back, and it was quite a process,
and today we can do these things
on the computer, you know, in 30 seconds.
It's really kind of mind-boggling.
The final drawings are very accurate and they're very well drawn.
And the level of detail in these drawings is such that we could,
with careful manipulation on the photocopier,
use them to trace details.
And, if you check them, they were absolutely accurate in the field.
So, in this example, photogrammetry was a real advantage to our practice
because it was completed in a fraction of the time
that traditional measuring would have been
and it also provided access to areas that we would have had
to erect scaffolding, have lifts for many days.
The field documentation for this consists of notebooks full
of photographs, as well as measurement checks.
They're not traditional drawn field notes on graph paper
but it is an accessible record and it's a checkable record,
and so really does meet the criteria of the HABS standards.
Photogrammetry also makes it possible to document
in drawings things which are way too time consuming, even for students,
to document in a hands-on fashion, like the patterning of the grain
of the stone at the White House.   Photographs are great for this.
But being able to transfer the information
to a scalable drawing provides that extra level of information
that are the hallmarks of HABS standards.
And this is, really, pretty quick and easy to do.
And now with digital photography and things like Photoshop,
we can do a kind of guerrilla photogrammetry in our office
and the interns, kind of, whiz these things together with amazing skills.
A photograph of a facade can be overlain on a drawn elevation
to document conditions precisely, such as the plaster
at the Clara Barton apartment here in Washington.
With traditional methods, this would have taken us much longer to measure
and many more approximations would have been made.
So this documentation does meet the HABS standards and in addition
to providing information about a significant historic building,
the drawings provide the basis for construction documents
from which a bidder may make a really accurate quantity takeoff
of the plaster repair as we are able to trace the actual outlines
of the deteriorated plaster.
CAD drafting can, of course, be used with any kind of measuring method,
the photgrammetric or the traditional,
and it's really the standard in the architectural office.
And, as David pointed out, I think those drawings, David, were 2002,
were the last ones that were drawn by hand.
And when old-timers like us really want to draw something we have
to hunt for a drawing board and tape and all that other stuff.
But the level of precision of CAD drafting, like hand drafting,
is all a matter of time and care.
With traditional measuring, lines can be constructed
to precise dimensions, including any lack of square,
or they can be squared up.   And the same thing with CAD.
There's a whole section of the HABS Standards devoted to CAD drafting
so that the drawings would be comparable.
But the downside is, of course, the loss of the hand of the draftsman.
In the hard times of the 30s and 40s,
many notable architectural draftsman like Frank Schutto Brown [phonetic],
and these are his drawings, produced artistic documents
that moved beyond representation of fact and really towards artwork.
So, to compensate for the lack of art we have to make sure
that we take the time and the care to achieve the accuracy
of which the CAD drafting is achievable.
So laser scanning is our new method, our new toy, as David pointed out.
And it grew out of the surveying world.
There are a huge number of articles
in the Professional Surveyor Magazine
about doing laser scanning on Heritage Properties.
The accuracy can really be astonishing,
picking up very small differences in surface profile.
But a huge electronic file size comes along with that.
Besides accuracy at high speed, laser scanning allows
for measuring things which can be inaccessible, very high elevations
or things which are structurally unstable, as pointed out.
It has advantages over other photogrammetry, which requires light
for the elements to be visible in a photograph,
and it provides dimensions, which in photogrammetry you have
to provide the dimensions and it kind of fills in the details.
Scanning is also an advantage for highly irregular sights
and structures, like prehistoric and archeological sites.
Before I show to you the HABS documentation for Taos,
and there's actually -- that has been scanned as well,
and the scan is available online.
So we've all used laser tape measures.
Like David said, you put the instrument down,
you see the red dot, you push the button,
and you read out a dimension.
So the scanners do the same thing, but they do it a lot
of times and a lot faster.
It projects a plane of laser pulses as it rotates through 360 degrees,
and while it's being done, you see a green line,
moving across the floors, the walls
and the ceilings of an interior space.
And it's recording -- it can record up to 50,000 points per second.
And then you see the point cloud developing
on the computer screen attached to the scanner.
This is Tudor Place, here in Washington, and the point cloud
for Tudor Place is on the right.
Some images from setting up a scanning operation.
The scanning can be accurate to a quarter of an inch, over a distance
of about 50 meters, which is around 165 feet.
This point cloud can show a hole in the plaster, a picture hanging
on the wall, a light fixture, if you're sitting in the room,
it's going to scan you too and you're going to show up in there.
The scanners have trouble with highly reflective surfaces,
because the beam is scattered and not returned.
Quickly. So each room needs to be scanned,
and probably from multiple locations to eliminate shadows,
and each parts of the elevations.
You have to register all these things together --
really it's kind of like surveying, and there should be targets assigned
to tie the things together, at least three in a room.
And that's -- the guy in the middle is setting up a target.
And then you can survey the targets very accurately
The post processing of the point clouds turns them into a model
in the computer, and then it can be cut
to produce two dimensional architectural drawings.
If there's enough overlap between the scans, they can be registered
to each other without the targets, which makes the setup easier,
and eliminates the need
for the highly accurate surveying of the targets.
And if you collect GPS data along with the scan,
then the information can be geo referenced or tied
into the overall mapping system for your locality.
So if it's is as easy as it sounds, why don't we do it every day?
Well, it's not easy as it sounds, and it's expensive,
partly because the equipment is expensive,
the scanners can cost upwards of a $100,000,
although I understand prices are coming down.
And in part because there's a lot of technician time and skill involved
in setting things up properly and doing the scanning
and post processing, and in particular for historic buildings,
the post processing is very complicated.
Producing the CAD drawings from the scans is most easily done
when there are standard, repetitive elements
or elements composed of standard shapes.
If detail isn't really necessary, it can go quite quickly.
Drawing something like this boiler room from the scan is easy,
because it is a collection of cylinders and other simple shapes.
It is not necessary for the purpose of the drawing to draw the hubs
and the lugs and the tags hanging off the valves.
And if fact, the biggest market
for laser scanning is large industrial facilities,
like offshore oil platforms and power plants.
But for a historic building like this one,
it's the Mary Church Terrell house in Washington,
it's important to document the detail.
And the scan of point clouds provide those highly accurate measurements
to visualize the surface, and then it's up to the operator
to translate that into drawings.
In many programs, there's a menu of standard shapes, but most elements
on historic buildings are not standard,
or they're ornamented in some way.
And this means they can't be extruded
in a straightforward manner.
The operator will have to create new shapes to extrude,
and extrusions have to change as the ornamentation changes.
When OPTERA [phonetic] created the model for 62 buildings
at St. Elizabeth Hospital through laser scanning,
they also created new shapes for extrusions in the drawings,
and did a lot of construction in architectural elements
in Architectural Desktop.
These images show the progression of the laser scanning process,
from the point cloud to the wire frame and to the model,
and finally to the architectural drawings.
The information captured here is recorded in more than 250 sheets
of architectural drawings, but it was created in less time
and for a lower cost than if we had sent teams
of interns out to measure.
We also have way more information than any team
of interns could have provided, as well as relative information
between every building on that site,
so the floor levels have been determined relative to each other,
so in the future, if they need to be connected in any way,
we have that information.
We also checked all the raw drawing data in the field, after we got it
from OPTERA, and it was as accurate or more accurate
than traditional measuring every could have been.
So, this project doesn't really meet HABS standards,
even thought the drawings are very accurate
because of the archival issues of storing and the backup.
But there are drawings, I believe, that have been produced
So we really do comply with the standards with the data capturing,
because it's highly accurate,
it's comprehensive, and it's very precise.
And this slide shows a comparison between a scan and a regular survey
of an archeological site.   The red line is the scan
and the black lines are the traditional surveying methods.
I'm not exactly sure how they determined which one was
in fact more accurate, but, you know,
we were told that the scanner was more accurate
and I probably agree with that.
So, unlike traditional field notes, the point cloud, the documentation,
the backup is not accessible without equipment and software,
and it also takes a huge amount of computer capacity to store.
So a researcher who doesn't have these abilities can't go back
to the field notes and look at things
and really see what you're looking at.
The other problem is that you have to store a digital file,
and I understand that HABS does not store the digital files
for CAD drawings.   They store the drawings themselves.
And the point clouds are so much larger than a CAD file,
that storing them is going to be even more of a challenge.
The physical drawings created
from these point clouds have the potential to be extremely accurate
and precise, especially if the post processing becomes more automated.
Right now, you have to choose what lines you're going to take,
and really there still is the hand --
the skill of the operator is really still involved.
LIDAR is a large scale form of laser scanning Light Detection
and Ranging, and it's more applicable, really, to mapping.
It's done from an airplane, usually a twin engine airplane,
which seems to be significant in some way,
rather than a single engine airplane.
It has a vertical accuracy of about six inches vertically,
and it uses equipment capable of recording 2,000
to 5,000 pulses per minute, in a series of overlapping passes.
And that's much less fine an increment than the scanners used
in building measurement, which are 50,000 pulses per minute.
This data can also be geo-referenced by collecting GPS data
for each data point as it is recorded,
with a sensor mounted on the aircraft.
The data is initially presented as a color gradient map,
which can be correlated to aerial photography or other base maps
for further interpretation.
The yellow is the zero line here, and this is beachfront,
and they use this a lot to document beach erosion.
It's not suited for recording buildings, but it has been used
for landscape recording, and for archeological sites.
It has the same issues as far as compliance with the same standards,
because of the accessibility of the backup documentation.
So today we have many documentation tools at our disposal,
and many can be used to be more accurate
and faster than ever before.
So why do we not do documentation to HABS standards more?
And the primary reason is cost.
Most clients are not willing to pay for the extra level of documentation
that is not needed to complete their project.
You remember David's question "what do I need?"
Well, in most cases, we don't really need that much information.
Construction documents can be prepared using measured base
drawings that are not as precisely measured or drawn,
and even much historical analysis can be completed
with less detailed and precise documents.
Sadly, we may not need HABS standards in practice,
but we can always strive.
Even when the client's goal is historical documentation,
the cost can be still be a stumbling block.
Less detailed documentation can often meet the purpose I've recently
been discussing with a client options for creating a set
of HABS documentation for this building,
Hollybush, at Rowan University.
The cost of a summer intern team was estimated at $50,000 or higher.
So we've been brainstorming ways to use the sources of the University,
which does not have an architectural or preservation program
to prepare the documentation.
Engineering students may do the measuring and drafting,
photography students and professors may do the photography,
and history students may work on the history section.
With a more modest investment by the University
in supervision it could result in a set of HABS documentation
for this significant property, where in 1967, Lyndon Johnson met
with Aleksei Kosygin in the Glassboro Summit,
and this is actually at Orange Room that they are meeting in,
and all of that was covered up for many, many years.
There are still, however, situations in which we need
and in practice do this level of documentation.
One is mitigation.
When I served on the historic sites council in New Jersey,
HABS documentation was a routine requirement before any demolition
of a register listed building would be approved.
These drawings and photographs of Louis Kahn's Daycamp Pavilions
at the Trenton Bathhouse were prepared to document their condition
after 50 years, and to enable a precise reconstruction
of the two larger pavilions which are deteriorated beyond repair.
The set also includes a site plan to locate the pavilions.
These drawings and photographs will be donated to the HABS by the owner
of the property, and the base information will be used
in the construction documents for the reconstruction
of the two large pavilions.
Because these structures are very spare,
traditional measuring was combined with CAD drafting effectively
and economically documenting these buildings.
In other situations, property owners do not have the luxury
to plan for reconstruction.
Fortunately, this project began with a preservation plan,
including measured drawings of the plans elevations and sections.
The documentation was not actually completed to HABS standards,
again because of the constraints of the budget of a public parks agency.
As we struggled with construction documents for the reconstruction,
we wished that the documentation had been more extensive,
be we were appreciative of the original requirements
to make a record of the building.
But even with examples like this one, money still rules,
and documentation beyond the minimum needed
to create construction documents often loses out.
It's difficult to convince owners
and sometimes our own financial watchdogs of the value added
So, while laser scanning has become more routine,
the main problem is the ability
to store the measurable record -- the point cloud.
It's a huge amount of data stored in these clouds that cannot be accessed
without the right software, and without enormous storage capacity.
Even though our firm was the prime contractor and project manager
for the laser scanning at St. Elizabeth's,
we do not have the terabytes of capacity needed
to store the point clouds or the model constructed from them,
nor do we have the infrastructure to run the software.
I am hopeful that in the next 25 years we will be able
to develop our [unintelligible] stable methods
for storing the backup data and for making it accessible.
There is an organization that has taken on the challenge
of storing this kind of information.
CyArk -- they do scanning of cultural resources --
and they have an online archive of this scan data, that's contributed
by their partners as well as by their own projects,
and their slogan is "Digitally preserving
and sharing the world's cultural heritage."
CyArk was formed by Ben Kacyra,
the developer of the HD scanner under the Cyrax name.
Kacyra sold the company to Leica Geosystems
and began this CyArk Website.
On the Website, the scans, the CAD drawings, the photographs,
the point clouds and videos
of significant heritage sites are stored and are accessible.
The site has a viewer for the point clouds,
like this one for Beauvais Cathedral -- you can rotate it around,
you can play with it, it's really a lot of fun.
But without the specific software, however,
you can't extract the dimensional detail from the point cloud.
You can also access the photographs and drawing
and really remarkably, it is free.
So do we need to change the standards
so we can use them more in practice?
I think that's a pretty dangerous path.
Possibly for buildings that are constructed in the mechanized era,
a very precise level of measurement may not be required.
It may not be important that the construction is an inch off here
or there, or a degree out of square.
So allowing a relaxed measurement standard might encourage more
buildings to be submitted to the collection
from practicing architects, increasing the amount
of resources available to us.
But for buildings that are constructed in a vernacular fashion,
the details are important,
especially to make comparisons with other structures.
And relaxing the standards for these buildings would reduce one
of the greatest values of the collection --
the consistency of the drawings and the ability
to rely on the information.
Finally, I think there needs to be a discussion of how
to store the field notes of laser scanning,
so that the backup becomes readily accessible.
The field notes are like the lab journals of a scientific researcher,
and are of equal value to the finished product.
So as an architect, I'm committed to keeping the HABS standards viable,
and there are a few things that I can do.
I'm going to kind of take the pledge here.
I can promote the preparation of documentation
and especially documentation to the level of HABS standards.
Second, I will try to use more graphic representations
of information as was done in the early HABS drawings.
The document should not just be a sheet that sits in a drawer.
It should show more information and it can.
This drawing was done in the 1930's and the --
pushed the wrong button there -- okay.
This was paneling that was made into like a pantry closet in a kitchen.
But it was paneling that was actually from the original bed box,
and the marks for where that was located were found in the building,
and the pantry was actually built into the jamb-less fireplace,
so it was under the hood of the jamb-less fireplace,
and it's really quite remarkable.
The man who did these drawings, Dan Hopping [phonetic],
measured them all and put them all together, and he came to the end
and he said "There's a piece missing."
And it was this piece and they found it in the attic.
So, and also this piece of cornice mold was upside down,
being used as a floorboard.
So there's a lot of information you can put on drawings.
And putting the information about the building and about the materials
and the finishes on the drawings really does help both us
and our clients to understand it more readily.
Another opportunity that I see for architects and documentation
to HABS standards is to use it as base mapping for GIS.
You can then use the layered database system to record things
like the ghost information and other clues and reconstructions
and to link material analysis and finish analysis
to a given spatial point.
So as we celebrate HABS at 75, this is HABS at 50,
as I receive the first Peterson Prize from Charles Peterson
at AI headquarters almost 25 years ago this month.
Over these past 25 years, we have seen the development
of photogrammetry, CAD drafting, and laser scanning,
and I'm looking forward both to the developments we will see
at a hundred and to continuing to be associated with the documentation
and HABS for 50 years, like my mentor
and early HABS delineator, Daniel M.C. Hopping.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
Female Speaker: Thank you, Anne, that was great.
We're going to take a fifteen minute break,
so that you can all stretch your legs and refuel,
and join us back in 15 minutes, please.
Okay, last but certainly not least is Katherine Arrington.
Katherine is a digital library specialist for the Library
of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, and a recognized expert
on government standards for digital media.
She received a B.A. Degree in Humanities from the University
of California at Berkeley in 1988, and joined the Library of Congress
as part of the Digital Conversion Team in 1995,
and has long coordinated all digital aspects of preparing the HABS,
HAER and HAL documentation for its online presentation.
The records of the these three programs represent the single
largest visual online visual collections within the library --
5.5 terabytes of data representing over 550,000 digital images
of photographs, history pages, architectural drawings
and supplemental material.   Kit has also overseen projects
for the digital conversion oversize print collections, cartoon drawings,
photographic albums and glass negatives.
Her expertise has been recognized through many special assignments,
such as work on the Library-wide committees to develop documentation,
training materials and policy recommendations
for digital conversion of collections,
as well as representing the Library on external working groups.
Most recently, Kit served on the program committee for the 2007
and 2008 Society for Imaging Science
and Technologies International Conference on Archiving.
The goal was to address the challenges of archiving modern
and historic materials in an increasing digital world.
Of particular note, Kit contributed the extensive chapter
on digiting photographs to the Society
of American Archivists 2006 publication, entitled "Photographs:
archival care and management."
Kit's interests also extend to hands on preservation, including a term
on the board of the Eastern Market Preservation
and Development Corporation,
established to protect the 135 year-old market located in the heart
of her historic Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington,
D.C. We at HABS are all very grateful to Kit's guidance
in the digital imaging field and for her tireless efforts along
with her colleagues in helping to provide the online access for HABS,
HAER and HAL collections that has increased its use exponentially.
Her talk for today is entitled "HABS:
A Digital Present and Future."   Please welcome Kit Arrington.
[ Applause ]
Katherine Arrington: Thank you very much.
Okay, the slides are up.   I'm going to test this now -- okay.
I want to thank the planning committee for asking me to be a part
of this day, and it's very wonderful to be wrapping it all up.
I'll try not to keep you here too long, I know it's been a long day,
but just as Ford began it, I'm thrilled to be here,
because I love HABS, HAER and HALS.
I've been at the Library now for thirteen years,
which is nothing in Library time.   I'm still a new guy.
I've worked with these collections,
it's been my primary job for all of that time.
Everyone says "What are you doing?"   It's like "Well, same thing."
But you know what?   It's always different.
And that's the excitement of it.
Well, as you've already heard described in wonderful detail
by Ford Petras, the Historic American Building Survey, HABS,
is not only one of the top research collections in the Prints
and Photographs Division, it's also one
of the most heavily used collections in the Library overall.
I'm not going to waste your time telling you why the collection
is important.
That's what this day has been all about,
and everyone coming before me has done a much better job
of that than I ever could.
What I want to do is share with you how it's availability
in a digital format has allowed the world to more readily access
and benefit from the caliber of its materials.
They're shared beyond the confines of our hallowed walls for years,
through state indexes, microfilm
and other regionally distributed mechanisms.
Once we converted the original negatives
and architectural drawings, written histories to digital images
and we made them available online,
the reach of HABS has expanded exponentially.
Like many things whose purpose and usefulness has been transformed
by the World Wide Web -- in case any of you are looking for a place
to stay for the inauguration --
HABS has a new life from its online presence that we look forward
to both expanding and preserving.
HABS was an obvious choice when the Library first explored using the new
technology of digitization and the World Wide Web
to create access to its collections.
Not only did PNP recognize that, but so did the groups hired
by the Library to review all of the possible collections in the Library,
groups that researched historical content, relevance,
and a newly emphasized element, significance for kindergarten
through high school audience,
which the Library had not easily served in the past.
Over ten years ago, we began mounting the National Parks Services
collections database online in a Web searchable format,
started digitizing HABS and its kin, HAER, and beginning in 2000, HALS --
I can do this anywhere can't I?
Thanks in part to the National Parks Service's ability
to not provide digital images for much
of the transmitted documentation, quarterly transmittals
of new material are generally available on the Web shortly
after we receive them, and after the Prints
and Photographs Division has processed the materials
and digitized then original negatives.
Now you've heard a lot of numbers.
I'm going to try and put them in a format
that you can see a little bit.
The numbers of items digitized and available online today
for the three collections are huge.
It's 263,000 photographs, and over 62,000 drawings,
223,000 pages of written histories, taking up five and a half terabytes
of server space, which represent a third of PNP's server space overall.
This chart is supposed to show you.   That's how much size about one black
and white negative takes, about 20 megabytes.
That's 160 megabytes for a D-sized, 24-by-36 color scan of a, say,
popular graphic art print.
Five terabytes, that's HABS, HAER, HALS.
This is all of the 1.2 million digital objects of the Prints
and Photographs Division.
It's big. Oh, and here's the fun part.
Everybody always wants to know this.
So, it's -- here's a twist, you haven't seen this one yet.
Measuring online usage has become a very complex job, because there are
so many possible points of access -- other Websites, blogs,
search engines, referrers from academic course management programs,
to social bookmarking, but the Library does have some tools
that we use to try to get a sort of a sense on online usage.
So we did a one year study, from fiscal year 2007,
which is October2007 through September 2008,
of visits to the HABS, HAER, HALS Websites,
which includes both American Memory and Peacock [phonetic].
In that 12 month period, we had 420,000 site visits, which,
if you average it out to a daily, is about 1,150 site visits.
532,000 images downloaded.
So that's people taking photographs, or drawings,
or written history pages that they wanted,
downloading the images and using them.
6,160,000 Web pages viewed.
So that's these 420,000 visitors doing that much searching
through all of the Websites.
On the daily average -- I know the people in the back can't see these,
because they're at the bottom --
the visitors would be as if it was 1,150 a day, images downloaded --
3,225 a day, 16,876 of the Web pages viewed a day.
And how did they all get to the Website?
Some data that we have shows that many arrive by typing
in a URL address or clicking on a link that exists somewhere else.
A fair number arrive from Wikipedia, where HABS is frequently used
as a reference source for other things.
This is the Wikipedia entry for James Madison's home Montpelier,
and as you can see they've used a HABS drawing and linked back
to the documentation in the HABS survey.
Others find their way in through search engines,
Google being the most popular,
or from genealogical services, such as Ancestry.com.
Although, we will warn you,
typing "HABS" into a Google search won't necessarily bring you
to an architectural collection.   HABS also happens to be the nickname
for the Montreal Canadiens Hockey team, as well as their fans.
But if you do a Google search for HABS,
you'll also get the Historical American Buildings Survey intermixed
with the HABS hockey team.
Historic American Buildings Survey will get you a more accurate result,
but it's longer to type.
The links and references to HABS that we would expect
to have naturally evolved on the Web have done so,
and we find people coming to the collections
from historic Websites -- this is the Sycamores in South Hadley, Mass,
labors of love of individuals --
this person's put together a Website called "Cup
of Jersey South" [laughter] -- it's a history of South Jersey,
places and people, with a few HABS images, such as this,
the Oakford House, which includes a tale from the 1934 HABS history
about the ghost of a continental soldier from the Revolutionary War,
guarding the basement's purported buried treasure left
by war refugees.
Vanished buildings -- this site's called "Built in St. Louis,"
and it documents an entire city block in St. Louis
that was documented by HABS that has now been torn down and replaced
by a Bock's [phonetic] department store.
People that have specialty interests.
This is a Website for theater organs, and they found
on the Website, on the survey of the Alabama Theater in Birmingham,
Alabama, photos and documentation of Big Bertha,
which is the theater organ of the Alabama Theater.
Many university libraries
and reference consortiums include portions of, or links to all
of the collections as part their database search options,
under the topic of 'architecture.'
These include the university libraries of Texas, Louisville,
Arizona, New Haven, or the database of Philadelphia architects
and buildings, to international database consortiums --
the British Columbia history internet Website,
or something called "Intuit ' [phonetic] in the UK,
which is a consortium of seven different universities
that have joined resources to find a lot
of good links for people to go to.
"Best of" Websites include HABS frequently.
This one is called "Ten Links.com," HABS is found
under their architecture listings.
And what exactly are all of these people doing with all
of the information that they're finding in the HABS surveys?
Of course we can't know every use.
A Web search won't show me when a set designer has used HABS,
or when a researcher has downloaded groups of drawings by style
for a personal slideshow image collection, but I know of that
from one of our reference librarians telling me about it.
But we did find a wide range by doing a Web search.
That's a medley of different images.
This is -- might be pronouncing it incorrectly --
Stabler, Leadbetter Apothecary Museum in Old Town,
the recyclorama trying to preserve the cyclorama
at the Gettysburg battlefield, Paramount Theater on Flicker,
the drawings of the White House on the White House Website.
One place where we've really benefited is from people looking
up all of these things, all of these surveys on the Webs,
and sending us corrections to mistakes in the collection.
Because they often know the sites better than we do,
because it's their family home, or the county they live in,
and we've spelled the county name incorrectly.
Many are using HABS as it's always been used,
as we've already seen in previous examples.
People are researching historic properties for reasons
of preservation, renovation, architecture studies
or social history and genealogy research,
and they're using the freely available materials
in the collection to present their work on and off the Web.
And being the Web, of course some find the collections just strike
their fancy, and they want to share that experience in Web 2.0 venues,
of blogs or social bookmarking.
Of course now, many people are using, are easily able to use all
of the rich tools of the collection from anywhere in the world
that has an internet connection.
A range of some of those use examples are the Buffalo
as an architectural museum.
A fellow that has put together this Website of places in Buffalo,
and he received special commendation from the mayor
of Buffalo in 2002 for the Website.
This is a Website, part of Wikipedia, called Wikimedia Commons,
and it's a place you can go to find images that are
in the public domain, which of course all of HABS, HAER, HALS is.
Over 1,300 images have been added by other people to Wikimedia Commons,
and they've generally pretty accurately recorded
where they came from.
Carol Highsmith actually had one thrown in there as well, that was,
as she said, she is closely connected to HABS,
although she's not actually HABS --
something called "Viewliner Limited," a tour of Americana.
They include historic images of Los Angeles,
taken by Jack Boucher in 1960.
This is a history blog called "Shorpy," where an image
of a call box in Washington, D.C. taken in 1912, actually from one
of our other collections, Harrison Ewing.
And then a blogger who saw it immediately replied,
posting this image by Jack Boucher again of a call box in Washington,
and talking about the police using them.
This is a lovely set of packaged note cards,
raising money for the Mississippi Heritage trust,
or HABS documentation featured in the of sewers,
that covers the time period of 500 B.C through the 1930's,
and they found a lot of outhouses that were very useful [laughter].
This is one of my favorites.
This is a Website called "E Backroad.com."
They advertise HABS as a resource for free plans.
The site, actually, is a popular source for bringing folks
into the collections here at the Library.
What they do is they review and recommend North American home
and garden sites and offer a feature of free building plans,
many of which contain lists of HABS surveys,
with links the survey drawing Web pages, and categories
that include barns -- here's their barns entry.
Country homes, garages, bungalows, Cap Cod houses, greenhouses,
salt box houses, and play houses.
They were actually able to mine reference librarian --
Marilyn Ibock had created some of those lists that they took verbatim.
Their "barns" link offered 15 Websites with free plans,
including this link to a list of HABS surveys.
There are also the personal blogs,
which choose to share their discovery of HABS with others.
This one is called "Uncommon Place Book Blogspot."
The blog offers an eclectic mix of video and images,
including this interesting image --
[unintelligible] this is a 1959 photograph of Villa Savois,
used as a barn before it was renovated, and when it was
in a state of deterioration after World War Two.
You can see the haystack up there in the corner?
But the link to HABS, he includes under what he calls the "uncommons"
and he offers all theses links to things he finds are interesting --
there's the HABS, and it immediately follows "Garfield minus Garfield,"
which if you go to, is a Webpage which shows the Garfield comic strip
with Garfield taken out, and after that is
"If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,"
which is an ongoing series of cultural and personal observations.
But HABS found a home there.
Another blogger comes self-described as "more or less the musings
of a 24-year-old New Yorker, who has among other things,
a great fondness for architecture."
And here's a series -- he's got a huge number of different images,
a lot of which he's taken himself, and this is a building in Louisiana,
New Orleans, that -- I was able to scroll down, which I can't --
this is the HABS version of it, and it's been renovated,
and he thinks that it's overly done, and it's kind of showy now.
Here's one that's another woman in Louisiana, she's called "Daylage."
[phonetic] She sells vintage jewelry among other things,
and she also lists HABS as her "places that you should visit."
Now, we're just going to follow a Web path.
if you were sample researching HABS online.
This is a fellow who went to a place in Tennessee called "Rural Mount,"
and took these photographs and presented them
in a set called "Abandonment."
He references the HABS survey of the site.
Next, from there, we can go to a Website
of the Tennessee Preservation Trust, which in 2007 added that same place,
Rural Mount, to its "Ten Most Endangered" properties in Tennessee.
Visiting the HABS survey itself, we find that we have documentation
from 1974 through 1983, that includes a 12-page history, 12 black
and white photos, and six measured drawing.
We can learn from history that the house was built by Alexander Outlaw
for is his son in law, Joseph Hamilton,
both of whom played instrumental roles in the founding of first,
the state of Franklin, which I think would be interesting to research,
I don't remember that being one of the fifty states,
and later the state of Tennessee,
which I'm guessing was probably the same area.
It's also significant as representing the style in the area.
Next, we find the Website of a Stanford Professor
in computer science and electrical engineering.
Possibly, some of the people here have heard
of him, his name is Lavoy.
One of his recent projects was heading a team that used lasers
to digitize statues of Michelangelo in Italy.
But in his Website, he describes his college summer experience
on the 1974 HABS team.
The documentation notes that he was a student assistant architect.
He posts images of the drawings from our survey,
and he offers the comment "Not the variations in line with used
to distinguish foreground from background features
and the highlight silhouettes."
He references the pens [phonetic] again,
in particular "diamond tipped quarter 000," that's very skinny,
that they were only allowed to use
for certain portions of the building.
And then he notes "Before my digerati colleagues scoff
at this quaint technology, let them try to convince me
that any computer data they have created will last 2,000 years."
The linking piece reference between Websites of art photographs,
preservations of historic sites
and creating architectural drawings is the HABS survey or Rural Mount,
which all three sites reference.
In addition to the personal architecture studies
of a 24-year-old New Yorker, there are also more formalized uses
of the online materials for the purposes of education,
in particular the new K-12 audience reached by internet.
Here's an example of a lesson plan for a kindergarten class study,
to find geometric shapes and images.
It's called "Identifying shapes in everyday life."
I'm sorry you can't see more of the images that were selected below
for them to find the shapes within.
A high school in Jerseyville, New York, does group projects,
selecting a site to study and answers questions
that explore topics of algebra and geometry through architecture.
It's entitled "When are we ever going to use this?"
Some of the lesson guide, and again people
in the back probably can't see this.
It includes standards that are addressed in the lesson plan.
"Students will gain understanding in relation to the rationale
by researching selected structures
from the Historic American Buildings Survey,
Historic American Engineering Records."
We see real-world applications of the math topics being taught
in algebra and geometry through architecture.
This was a history project
that created an 11-minute documentary video done
by Waynesburg University students, who, based on a survey
that they found -- it was actually a HAER survey --
on the W.A. & Sons foundry and machine shop in Rice's Landing, PA.
And they went to Rice's Landing, and they interviewed people --
it's now a museum -- and they made an 11-minute documentary,
which completely features images from the collection.
You can see it on the Web.
The Library of Congress has joined a consortium of 15 schools
and institutions to create a Website that's called
"Teaching With Primary Sources."
It contains resources and lesson plans that feature HABS
and at least 17 prepared teaching materials.
And then, finally, a university online survey course,
"History Matters," offers this really wonderful description of HABS
in the context of the online survey course.
The course was developed by the City University of New York
and George Mason University.
They write "outside some catalogs and published lists of sites,
few of which were thoroughly illustrated,
the only way to examine the contents of the HABS/HAER collection was
to visit the Prints and Photographs Division reading room,
armed with rolls of small change to copy the files.
Though this did not deter scholarship,
it did take some planning for those outside of Washington, D.C."
And what about the bells and whistles now available with elements
like BIM-- Building Information Modeling.
I hesitate to mention that, since it hasn't come up here yet,
and we certainly don't want to have to be dealing
with that one anytime soon.
But one of the points of bringing it up is
that the survey documentation available in HABS/HAER,
and HALS now, will assist people who are using these kinds of tools,
and the digital images we provide allow them to do modeling projects.
This is an example of an architectural firm
which many of you probably know.
It's Kristine Fallon & Associates, and she's done a lot of work
in the field on how to archive digital images of drawings.
But her firm used the technical specifications
from our digital images.
She was able to create a BIM model of an Adler & Sullivan --
what is now a church, the Pilgrim Baptist Church, in Chicago.
It was built in 1891 as a synagogue.   It was actually for a congregation
that Adler's father had been the first rabbi for, so it had a lot
of different reasons of significance.
Well the church burned in 2006, so as part of the plans to look
at the possibilities of renovation, they were able to use the drawings
and the photographs, and recreated the church in a BIM model
for exploring what might be needed to renovate the building.
This next one's interesting -- it's an animation class.
Architects are not historians, they're animators, and --
What they did was they took the documentation
for a house in Revere, Mass.
that no longer exists, but it was surveyed when it was still existing.
They took that documentation, and then they traveled
to other historic houses in the area, and they created
in their animation class this 3-D model of the house --
this is supposed to be the past -- now it's the present.
They went to other historic houses in the area to figure
out what the furnishing should look like, and the wallpaper.
They used the drawings and the photographs
to build a model of the house.
That's an example of one of the things they created.
There's also an interactive flash tool that you can use
And you can visit the different rooms.
All of this documentation was based on the HABS survey of the house.
Okay, let's go back to the presentation.
They'll wait until the image comes up.
Okay -- whoops.   I gave away one of my jokes.
All right, now what can we do to continue along this marvelous path
of increased access and new means of utilizing the collections,
while also preserving it through time and in the future?
Returning to our Stanford professor delineator,
he raised the excellent point that preservation of the documentation
through time is important.
That is what permits us to allow ongoing use of the materials,
for research, education, preservation and exploration.
Let's move now to a discussion
of the digital future of the collections.
Discussing the future begins with the past.
The Prints and Photographs Division is able to provide access to our old
and new collections because we spend enormous resources in time,
staff and money to care for
and preserve the collections through time.
Whoops -- the notebooks were empty, of course.
We are the custodians of these collections.
The HABS collection was established by individuals with the foresight
to know that the collection items needed
to be created using specifications
that would make them sustainable through time.
And in those instances where problems arise,
we have the expertise to preserve items
that deteriorate, but are salvageable.
This is an example of a deteriorated negative that we had a process
where you lift the pellicle off the safety of the film
and replace it on a new one.
Here at the Library we think in terms of centuries, not years,
which is practically inconceivable with digital formats.
But when adding digital items to our collections,
we continue to follow the same principals
of thoughtfully creating specifications
that will make those formats sustainable through time.
I've often described the library as a battleship.
Once on course, we don't turn on a dime,
so we must plan our course thoughtfully.
In the digital arena, we've been a leader
in establishing high standards of technical specifications.
For HABS, our choices have carried us
through many successful transformations of hardware
and software without loss of information in our digital images,
and without the need to migrate our images to another format -- yet.
We are focusing that same energy of study
and analysis on born digital formats.
Following the foresight of the original founders of HABS,
any decision to adopt a new format, digital or otherwise --
remember the MILAR was once new, too --
must be based upon the ability of that format
to accurately represent documentary information
and to be sustainable through time.
HABS standards are synonymous with archival quality.
They are standards to be followed
if the goal is high quality preservation documentation.
Our strategy for managing digital images is different
than for our analog collections.   HABS drawings, negatives,
and notebooks are best preserved being filed away,
untouched, in the dark and cold.
Then they can, in theory, be pulled out and viewed ten, or a hundred,
or hundreds of years from now.
In fact, the digitization has been one our most successful preservation
tools for HABS, as now the fragile original drawings
and negatives are rarely called upon for service,
and the notebooks are used much less frequently.
The digital images are used heavily for research and reproductions.
To preserve the digital images that we've made, and when planning
to accept items that have been created in a digital format,
our approach is the opposite of what we follow for our original items.
It is active and ever changing,
and we need to frequently touch the digital objects through time,
for backups, integrity checks, or even migration into a new format.
Currently we have a good understanding of our options
for the technical specifications and storage
of the digital images we have on hand for the collections.
The complex questions are what choices do we make,
as we move towards the born digital creation of the documentation.
This is because the images that we have, have met the research
and reproduction needs of our patrons.
We can adapt our digitizing and storage specifications
as technology capabilities change.
And, we continue to care for and have access to the materials
if we need to access them in the future.
As an institution, the Library is invested in monitoring
and participating in the digital technology changes
that are occurring.   For HABS particularly, we are aware
that photographers creating mitigation documentation nor any
documentation are having difficulty procuring supplies
of large format film, or finding a lab that can process
and print their large format negatives.
Digital photography is becoming the standard.
We are also aware of the preservation risks that come
with that medium, and I have to say that reference to CyArk company,
I thought of this story, because it raises fears.
This is the story of a company called Railroad Archiving,
that offered and Web hosting and preservation archiving service
for the digital images of professional photographers,
for an annual fee that wasn't cheap.
In late October, because their business plan had failed,
they sent a 24-hour notice that they would be shutting down.
As it's been playing out, it appears
that many photographers may be losing the images
that they'd stored with that company.
For photography, considerations that we have include:
as photography becomes digital, can digital capture what a negative can?
Does the equipment and corresponding operator expertise at the time
of capture and in processing
of the digital image replicate the information that's available
in a large format film negative?
How do we establish standards that replicate the authenticity
of information in a film negative, such as restrictions
on image manipulation, which is so easy with a digital image?
I missed a slide -- an example to consider is if we look
at the digitization specifications for capturing all
of the information available
in a four-by-five black and white negative.
You would need to create a sixteen bit digital image at 2,000 dpi,
ten thousand pixels, which would give you 160 megabyte file,
and that's if you're scanning a four-by-five negative and you want
to get all of the information that's in that negative.
So, 160 megabytes.
What's the equivalent standard for a HABS-born digital photograph?
What are the settings you have to make in your camera
to make it the equivalent amount of information?
And for the very practical consideration,
how quickly is film becoming obsolete?
And do we have to just make some choices about this?
For architectural design,
the process of hand drafting is fast being replaced
by computer generated software programs.
It was 1989 was the last time that they did hand drawing is school?
Features of added layers and elements not visible
in a two dimensional printout are becoming standard,
and this doesn't begin to touch upon the complexity of images captured
in a BIM designed project.
This example is a house that was built in 2005
from five sketches made by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 50's.
They were incorporated into a BIM modeling program
to build this house.
In the 2004 report generated for the Art Institute of Chicago
by Kristine Fallon & Associates, advising on establishing an archive
of digital files of drawings, the suggested archival format
for rendering from CAD drawings is TIFF.
The 400 dpi bi-tonal TIFF standard that we selected
for digital drawings fits that standard and has allowed
for converting to things like the BIM programs.
We're making the data that we have available in a sustainable format
so that others can bring in these sophisticated technologies
of the moment for their purposes.
Our concerns with drawings relate primarily to the rapid changes
in the design software used to create the drawings.
How can you sustain the resulting digital file through time?
There are so many new possibilities for representing information
in architectural drawings that aren't captured in a 2-D printout.
The reality is that industry needs drive technology changes.
The influence of cultural institutions that collect,
for example, architectural drawings,
does not greatly influence the design and development choices
of software and hardware companies who create the tools
that have transformed the field.
Though hand drawings are not yet extinct, they are increasingly less
and less a part of the process of design, particularly at the points
of construction and subsequent maintenance.
But fortunately, the industry does require preservation
of the documentation through time,
because maintenance can depend upon it.
So increasingly technology is making changes to adapt to those needs
of being able to preserve the digital images through time,
and we're going to take advantage of those as they're developed.
PDFA and PDFE formats are the types of things being considered.
Movements to support best practices for archiving these --
like CAD drawings, for example, are also being explored
in institutions and in the industry.
This is an example of a Website of Harvard University
where their planning office has established a CAD standard
that they require any building project that goes
on on-campus be delivered in their specification
of the CAD file format, so that they can absorb it into their system
and archive it through time.
I saw this first in 2006, and I noticed that it hadn't been revised
since then, so I'm not sure how effective the application
of it has been.   But the efforts are there.
I understand that it's another thing to get practicing architects
to implement these new standards, and that they can be restrictive
for the design process, and I know
that withholding a check can be persuasive,
which is what Harvard does, but that's not on options for us.
The gifts given by contributions to HABS, as we've heard all day,
are much richer, and they're well worth the effort.
For both born-digital drawings and photos, the Library monitors
and sometimes participates in both institutional
and industry explorations to establish technical specifications
for digital files that can be migrated through time.
We will also continue to work
with the National Parks Service HABS program --
all of their cultural programs --
to define standards for born digital documentation creation and delivery,
with the goal of both responding to the realities of technology change,
as well as maintaining the HABS standards
for preservation through time.
For now, where we are, in addition the negatives, color transparencies,
drawings and histories that the Parks Service sends to us,
we also get digital images of the typed pages and the drawings,
most of which are converted from CAD to TIFF images, or many of them are.
They've also recently begun to substitute high quality, archival,
pigment-based prints for the photographs that we put
in the notebooks, instead of making contact prints from the negatives.
So they scan the negatives
and they're creating these prints, digital prints.
On the other hand, we're also hitting problems
that have become commonplace for everyone in this digital era,
where printouts have become considered a backup of last resort.
The digital images are considered the first priority.
What we found is that we were getting lower quality printouts.
For example, we had a more increasingly frequent phenomenon
of poor quality printouts of architectural drawings,
from both mitigation documentations and projects from schools.
It's as if the physical drawings have become inconsequential
afterthought against transmitted digital images.
For us, of course, both matter.
And for the Web, truthfully, our current Web presentation suffers
from being both one of the first collections to go online
at the Library, as well as being an enormous
and very complicated online presentation.
Frankly, it's really a bear for our programmers.
But the Library is well aware of the gifts of research connections
that are offered in new technologies,
and through tools like Web 2.0.
For example, we're in the midst of a pilot project now,
posting two photo collections to Flickr and asking other people
to catalog them, although it's called tagging.
So we're exploring these.
For our Built in America Web site, we're planning on the addition
of PDF versions of the history pages.
And since the park service now has a very rich database
of item-level information, we're exploring , item information
for photos, photographers, much more information for each survey.
And we want to explore the means to take advantage of new research
and display options online.
The words not just the images are just as important.
The New York Public Library said
if you catalog something, then they'll come.
You have to be able to search barn or window, or door jam
and find the word to bring you to the record for it.
These are, I chose these as my last slide because this was a survey
that I actually [unintelligible] into the collection.
And if you look at the notebook, it's my handwriting
that has the call number on it.   And for me, the personal experience
of seeing these photographs was just a wonderful, breathtaking moment.
I love the practicality of a barn and having the horses,
but this view of the top hay loft and the light coming through,
I mean it's just stunning.   It's a beautiful image.
It's the Ritter Ranch barn in Colorado.
I think it says that.
The depths of the HABS collection is entirely due to the length of time
that it's existed and the support that it has received.
Ongoing projects continue to enrich the collection holdings,
and the creators of those projects are both excited by, and in the case
of photography particularly are driven by,
changes in the new possibilities offered by digital technology.
The Parks Service recognizes the difficulties
of achieving their standards and the loss of documentation
that is connected to that and is working on establishing ways
to broaden participation in the program,
while maintaining its fundamental goals and mission.
We're doing the same, adapting to the changing technology that creates
and preserves that documentation through time.
And we work, together with the Parks Service, in that process.
But if we aren't diligent in our choices,
and we haven't reached any conclusions yet, we will be at risk
of losing the digital documentation created during our time.
As they have in the past, HABS standards offer us the gift
of a standard that can be followed for establishing definitions
and guidelines for quality documentation
that has the best chance of sustainability through time.
We're working to continue to offer
that with our digital standards, too.
[ Applause ]   Female Speaker: Thank you, Kit.
We're just going to take five minutes
so we can get all our speakers together up front here
to answer questions and to field comments.
So, five minutes please.
I want to begin by thanking all of our speakers
and commending them for a job well done.
I really appreciate your work.   [ Applause ]
I hope that through their presentations,
that all of you have gained a little more insight, not just into HABS,
but into the value of the study of architecture that is so near
and dear to all of us here.
HABS has done a lot of good work and it's probably with the help
of many of you out there today.
In fact I'd like to take just a minute, please, to recognize,
first of all the staff of HABS and HALS.
If you could all please stand, everyone who works for HABS or HALS.
[applause] Thank you.
And please remain standing just for a minute, please.
And if those of you at the Library of Congress
who make the collections successful, if you could stand please, too.
And I know there are a lot of profs, professors out there
and their students who do Peterson Prize and what not.
If the professors and their students who are
in the audience would stand, too.
[applause] And then maybe any of the rest who have ever worked for HABS
or ever produced a HABS drawing, or somehow contributed
to a HABS project in any way.   Please. Okay.
Okay. I'm really glad that worked,
because that would ruin my next point if nobody actually stood.
My point is, I think the creation of HABS is sort
of a perfect storm, if you will.
The National Parks Service, the American Institute of Architects
and the AIA were all working independently on ways
to preserve our nation's architectural heritage.
You heard about Lester Hollin, who wore both hats in terms
of being the head of the AIA's Committee for the Preservation
of Historic Buildings, now the Historic Resource Committee,
and he was able to gather all of his colleagues together.
Most of the men who worked on his committee ended
up as district officers in the field.
So he had that mechanism in place.
And then you also have the creation of pictorial archives
of early-American architecture.
So, as Ford pointed out, there's already a mechanism for cataloging
and for coming up with formats and what not that allow the collection
to be digitized now so easily.
And, of course, the Parks Service then, interestingly enough,
the very first director of the Parks Service,
envisioned cultural heritage as a part to balance the landscapes,
the beautiful parks of the West.   And then Horace Albright
in the 1930s actually started putting that together.
And he's the one who sent Peterson to Virginia
to work on the Colonial Parkway.
And it was Peterson's interaction with the architects
at colonial Williamsburg that really got him thinking
about producing those drawings,
because the colonial Williamsburg folks were studying
pre-Revolutionary buildings and drawing them as a means
of informing their restoration projects.
So, you know, if all those things hadn't happened
at the same time the government,
the call for make work, it would have happened.
So, thank all of you.
It took all those people to get it going and it's going
to take all of you to keep it going.
So let's all work together towards that goal.
And on that note, then, I'd like to invite questions
or comments for our speakers today.   If anyone has a question.
Here, Elizabeth will bring the mic to you.
Male Speaker: My father used to live in a 19th-century house
that was not built orthogonal with straight lines,
and the right angles or whatever.
And he wanted me to draw a floor plan of the house.
So I did that, and I straightened the house out
and did the average distances in the rooms to make it simpler.
I guess the question is, when you do the HABS survey
of all these old buildings, and they're crooked and settled,
the building is settled and it's uneven, the floors don't match up
and all that, how do you handle that when you're doing the HABS?
Because every time I see these HABS drawings
that look very crisp and orthogonal.
Every room is a rectangular with right angles and everything,
but those historic houses, their corners rarely meet at right angles.
So do you regularize the plans and use average distances,
things like that, to make rooms
that are nearly orthogonal truly orthogonal?
Or do you actually go back and look at every angle, every crookedness
in the house, and incorporate that into the survey?
David Woodcock: I don't know why I got the mic,
but someone gave it to me, so.   No, HABS is very strict.
You record the building exactly the way you find it.
And that's perplexing for students,
because that's part of the challenge.
It's much easier to do it if it's all square.
And CAD programs particularly love everything being square.
So it's actually quite tricky.
But the answer is no; you draw it exactly the way you find it.
So you have to find ways
of understanding exactly the way the building's leaning,
whether the walls are falling over.
And we did a house a few years ago, a wood-framed house
that actually leaned differently on each of the three different floors.
So the whole thing was sort of doing this number,
as well as the floors being uneven.   It was a neat trick.
And that was the days before we were using computer technology.
Female Speaker: I have a follow-up question.
Recording irregularities is one thing.
Recording deterioration, such as the falling in of a roof, is another.
And I know for example that Winnoken in Virginia was recorded,
the roof was not, the roof was not coming down as we know it
to have been at that time.
Same for Toll's Point, which I showed you the drawings.
The elevations for that house show it; it's not a restored roof,
per se, it's just been put back together.
What is the HABS line on that?
David Woodcock: Well I think the HABS line and my interpretation,
and I'm only a modest faculty member, but my interpretation is
that you literally do draw what you've got.
So if something's fallen over, you draw it fallen over.
We were able, at the Seward Plantation I showed you the sight
plan of that.
But some of the large structures, the roofs had fallen in.
but we had photographs that actually predated the 1934 HABS collection.
They had some family photographs that went back to 1912
that we were able to access.   So we were able to indicate
on the drawing what had been there, at least by broken line.
But we actually documented the building the way we found it.
Interestingly, on the two slave quarters, and I call them
that because that's what the family called them, enslaved people.
They have now restored both of them.
They've done a wonderful job, and they've found a stonemason
in the area who is nearly as good a stone mason
as the original, enslaved person was.
Quite remarkable.
Female Speaker: I think though there probably are examples
in the HABS collection where they have drawn it corrected,
Camille [phonetic].
So I think it is sort of a mixed bag.
David's right, that's our policy, but.
Male Speaker: -- I could add something to that in terms
of actually doing some HABS here drawings.
There are occasions like doing broken windows,
where it's ridiculous.
You could let a field photograph tell you what the actual
conditions are.
And broken windows are broken windows.
I don't think that's an archaeological detail
that somebody 100 years from now would care about.
And my understanding at least from the Herer [phonetic] side,
you use the written history, the field work and photographs as well
as the drawings that show what that building actually is today.
But your field photographs can take care of a lot
of those as-is conditions.   When the standards call you to look
for things are significant and document those.
I don't know that broken windows are all
that significant unless you're talking that this is
in a vandalized part of town or something.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
I think another too, is when you're looking at scale drawings.
The gentlemen that asked about squareness of the rooms.
They may appear to be actually squared to quarter-inch scale,
but things like an inch or two inches
out at a quarter-inch scale barely show up.
So even though the building may be out a square, you just don't see it
that fine of scale when you're doing something that way
that should show up in the CAD file.
But lots of times those aren't accessible to users.
But you should see that in the field notes if you have access to them.
That's about all I have to say about that.
Female Speaker: I have all kinds of questions,
but I'll try to narrow it down.
I was wondering how HABS is increasing the collection
in addition to the summer program where students do documentation.
And secondly, I was doing work in Georgetown,
and looking up what is recorded in Georgetown on HABS.
And I was surprised there were not more properties recorded.
I wondered if anybody had thoughts
about things that are under-recorded?
And thirdly, are there any grants out there available
for doing HABS recordation?
Katherine McGuire: Okay, maybe I should start.
David Woodcock: Katherine McGuire is the chief of the HABS program
and nobody better to answer your question.
Katherine McGuire: Well there's the ideal world
and there's the real world and they're colliding
in the early days of the survey.
That's why they called it a survey at that time.
The district officers sort of went out and they looked
for the best examples of architecture
and they actually created a listing with the idea
that they would go back and draw those buildings.
And of course, we keep adding to that now.
Their cutoff date was 1860, so we keep adding to the list,
which is now the National Register
of buildings that should be recorded.
There isn't a kind of funding that we wish we had
to be able to do that today.
So a lot of it is selected through various ways.
A lot of it is Parks Service and another government-funded buildings.
Some of the work comes in through what we call mitigation,
which is when Federal money is used it will impact historic buildings.
That they're required to do documentation.
That's actually a great way for a wide variety
of building types to come together.
And then there are various people who sponsor HABS work.
And that's one of the reasons, too, that we are trying very hard
to encourage other groups
and architects doing restoration projects,
to donate to the collection, to add to it.
We all have our back-pocket wish list,
but we're not always able to get to those.
What we've been trying to do to stretch our dollar a little bit,
is when we are someplace recording a building that we look
for other buildings in the area.
And then we at least photograph those buildings.
So whether it's lists we get from the Society
of Architectural Historians or you know our own favorite buildings
or just something cool we passed on the street.
We're trying to add in every way that we can.
I'm trying to remember your other questions.
Oh, grants, grants.
Yes, that's something we need to spend more time exploring,
because there are certain grants out there,
but I think even the State Historic Preservation Offices used
to be a great source for a lot of the surveys that a lot
of others here have talked about,
how we cut our teeth on the children's own.
What did Katherine call that, the children's crusade?
So a lot of that money has dried up and has gotten harder and a lot
of the grants are directed toward National Historic Sites.
And they're available and exploring other avenues
for that is something we need to tackle.
And if anyone else has anything to add to that.
Female Speaker: Just one quick very small question.
I heard references to inability to find the film for the four by five.
Is that really a problem?
I was going to start looking into that, to take four by five pictures?
Katherine McGuire: I think five by seven is even harder.
So yes, and that's part of our issue.
We clearly, as a lot of the speakers we've talked about,
walk a fine line between, you know, maintaining archival standards
and just locating some of these elements, like film and paper.
And so any decision we make in the future is going to have
to be weighed against those types of issues.
It is still available.   Four by five, more so.
It is still available.
We've been having more problems with the contact paper.
And that's why as Kit showed you,
we're scanning the original negatives and applying that directly
on to a card stock as opposed to making the contact prints.
So it eliminates the need for that contact paper and sort
of streamlines the process.
Once we've scanned that images, we can hand it over to the Library
and we can put it on the site that much more quickly.
Female Speaker: Thank you.   I have a question for Anne.
And this has to do with preservation practice in firms such as yours
and others in acquiring, well contracting out for documentation.
You indicated that for the scanning part,
which is very complex that's usually done by specialty companies.
But do you do the photogrammetry and the measured drawings,
particularly if there's some mitigation in house.
Or do you contract with other people to do that.
And if you do contract out, how much specification do you put in other
than "meet HABS standards," you know?
Anne Weber: Well, you're correct, that we don't do the scanning piece.
The, we usually would work with the person that does,
or the firm that does the scanning,
to develop what we think are the appropriate parameters to accuracy
for how much we're going to be able to scan.
And to determine before we start what they can scan and what we have
to actually measure a draw.
And we would also build in some checking, again to make sure
that as you develop the document, the drawings from the scan data
that they are coming out right.
That if you have sort of a wavy edge, that if you don't end
up with ten lines at the corner of the building,
that you have one line, and that one line is really the correct line.
Female Speaker: For the lower level, less technical documentation
and photogrammetry or measure drawings,
do you still contract out for that?
Do you have companies that do that service?
Or do you do it in house or do firms do it in house
or are there specialty conservation groups that do that?
For the lower level.
Anne Weber: Yeah, anything that we can physically measure efficiently.
For larger, more complicated things that require photogrammetry
because they're inaccessible or because there's a lot of detail
that maybe is difficult to physically measure,
then we would contract that out.   And there are companies.
I mean I know at least one, Frazier Associates in Virginia,
that specializes in doing photogrammetry.
And we would hire somebody like that,
somebody like Quantapoint does photogrammetry,
and also does scanning.   So there are a lot of options.
And again, talk to them about levels of accuracy and precision.
David Woodcock: Can I just add something to that,
because I think one of the things that I was talking
about was the issue of building confidence
in the people doing the documentation.
Of course I was specifically talking about students and learning to come
to grips with buildings and understand and have the confidence
in their own judgment about what to measure.
And certainly I'd agree with Richard Anderson
that you know you probably don't want to measure a broken window,
because that's not that significant.
The lean on a building is a different kind of issue.
But I think there's also a level of confidence in the question
that you were asking, Sharon.
And you talked about working closely in alignment with the firms
that are providing you the data.
In the UK now, there are hardly any schools of architecture
that are included, doing the kind of thing
that I did when I was a student.
Of course I was a student a long time ago, so time does change.
But the issue of having confidence in the data that you get seems
to me the critical issue.
And if I can make a brief plug, at this time next year,
the AIA Historic Resources Committee and the Association
for Preservation Technology.
And I was informed by Richard O'Connor,
the Chief of the Heritage Documentation Services this
afternoon at the National Parks Service
and the General Services Adminstration
and several other groups will be putting on a two-day symposium
in Los Angeles on the 2nd and 3rd of November.
And we're going to be looking at capturing data for use
in renovation, restoration and construction.
And we are going to get into the dreaded issue, I'm afraid, Kit,
of Building Information Modeling.
Because the interaction between those two things it seems
to me is the key issue in which we're all very concerned.
I am frankly disappointed in my colleagues in the Royal Institute
of Charters and Surveyors who have by and large taken
over from the RIBA team the whole business of gathering data
about existing buildings.
So if you want a house built now, RICS is the group to go to,
because the RIBA folk don't do that anymore.
And I think that's sort of a mistake,
because I think unless you actually understand the building
by having been around it, you're sort of operating second-hand.
It would be a bit like your surgeon, you know, being given a set of data
by somebody to say we've done an examination on these people,
and we think you should cut here.   Okay, you know.
It would worry me a little bit, I think.
Male Speaker: Perhaps you've already begun to answer my question,
but in your lifetime, you've gone from manual measurement
in the field, to manual drawings, to photogrammetry and scanning
and all sorts of computer assistance.
What do you see in your future, or what do you want to see
in your future for the next quantum leap in technology
to advanced documentation?
David Woodcock: I don't know why I'm on the hook for some reason.
Maybe because I'm in the middle.
Male Speaker: [low audio] David Woodcock: Yeah,
well I'm not sure it's whether we want to see what's happening.
I think what is happening is what we're trying to discover first
and then trying to get some questions out there
to see what the future might hold.
The integrity of the data to me is the big issue
and being able to trust the team.
The trans-discipline routine that we worked with today, I mean,
I showed an image of a bunch of people at the top
of a tower using repelling ropes and all kinds of things to go get stuff.
That's my good friend Kent [unintelligible]
and his firm Vertical Access.
I should quickly say there are several other firms
that provide that kind of service.
This isn't a plug for one individual group.
But obviously unless we all want to put on ropes and climb to the top
of the towers to get samples and check the thickness of the materials
and all that kind of good thing, which is, you know I'm past doing
that myself I think at this point.
You have to find a way of getting the information transferred
from one group of people to another and what we're looking at I think
in this particular symposium that we're planning a year from now,
and heaven knows what will happen with some
of this material we're using
from now is how do you ensure safe transfer
and accurate transfer of the data?
How does somebody like me know what to specify?
How do I know what to ask for that will provide me the information
that I need?
And I think Anne has made the point that if you can do it in house,
if you can send your team effectively and efficiently,
if money isn't the issue, then that's the best thing to do.
Because the team that is making the decisions has got the information.
Then they've got it themselves.
And I think there's no better way of doing it than that.
Where we're going next, as you know, things are moving so quickly.
It's quite fascinating.
Female Speaker: well, I'd like to also just add to that.
I think what's come across today,
part of it is your purpose in creating that.
I think there's two camps, two very friendly camps,
but two camps of thought.
And then part of it is, are we doing it as a research tool to learn
about buildings, in which case we want to go back to the Stone Age.
I think not maybe progress
to the new technology that's beyond laser scanning.
But I think laser scanning certainly we've learned, too,
that every tool has its purpose.
And when you're dealing with huge buildings,
we do want the most modern technology.
And I think as Willy Graham at colonial Williamsburg pointed
out to me that HABS was state of the art at the time.
And they probably had these tools, they might have used that.
So they begrudgingly admit that to you.
That laser scanning has its place.   But I think that hand drawing,
or hand measuring at least, does as well.
So I think we'll always sort of walk that fine line.
Male Speaker: One of the things I've always wanted, and it may not have
to the Library or the Parks Services role now,
is optical character recognition scanning, of all the words
and the drawings, which don't follow a standard nomenclature.
That would so expand the intellectual access to the material.
You would think of how many, like you know,
if she's looking for a casement window.
There's nothing in any of the cataloging.
A metal casement window or something like that.
You know it's just not in there, and if you look and see all of that,
that would be very useful.
And one thing actually I should have said this morning at closing.
It's not really a tool but it's something for the future is one
of the things that we are proposing.   The AIA, our partners, have approved
and we think we have a potential sponsor for is another prize
for a new one-sheet drawing perhaps, which is something
that could be used in the classroom and it could be a semester.
We think it would bring in a whole new group of people.
It would bring more drawings into the survey,
and we want to have a prize for that called the Lester Hollin prize.
So there would be another prize in addition to the Peterson prize.
I see that as a tool.   Male Speaker: On the subject
of character recognition an additional information
that can be mined out of the collection,
I wondered to what extent there is a thought
of digitizing the field notes?
Whether that was something that might happen in the future.
Female Speaker: No.   [laughter] But maybe.
The field notes are the field notes because they are so full
of non-standard material, which is what makes the rest
of the collection manageable and accessible.
There's so many different kinds of things that are in the field notes.
That we don't want to get rid of them but they're very tricky,
even just to serve and to-- and it's a choice of [unintelligible].
How many collections that Ford was showing that we have
that are wonderful supplementary information.
If we could do the HABS, or if we could do that PAEAA,
the early-American architecture,
which are more structured and formalized.
Just the processing of the field notes that would be required
to prepare the material for scanning it's just,
it's enormous from a lot of different places.
Instead what we hope is that survey documentation is rich
and full of information.
And if you really are curious about the site, and interested and wanting
to know more, you can see in the record that there are field notes.
And they are accessible.   So you can then inquire about them.
And you can get access to them.
But they're not on the list for scanning at this time.
Female Speaker: Now we have talked about sort of a hybrid drawing,
a field drawing if you will, maybe adding that to the collection
at some point and exploring that as an avenue, since, you know,
it has-one of the other points that's been made, and very politely
by some individuals who didn't want to just totally rat us out,
but that our standard though producing wonderful results is not
always practically applied, particularly to those very buildings
that we profess to stand up for, to serve.
And those are vernacular buildings, so maybe the idea that we come up
and codify a standard that looks at significant details
and only what's important or perhaps explore a field drawing if possible.
Male Speaker: It sounds like what Mr. Petrus was suggesting,
maybe something almost like a HABS
or HAIR [phonetic] level two documentation for a drawing.
That kind of picks up on the gentleman
who was asking about accuracy earlier.
What we've been looking here or what HABS had called level one,
which was very archaeological and very precise,
but there's also a level two, which is a less intense and less kind
of a total than level one.
You might idealize a building under certain circumstances,
because the significance of the building may not be
in all these little details but just the general plan or elevation of it.
So you may not be looking at all the deformations and missing pieces
and things quite as archaeologically and rigorously as before.
That might even be a less expensive way to approach some buildings,
doing the level two work.
But that is something spelled out in the HABS standards.
But if you do a drawing like that you probably should annotate the
drawing, saying that is what you're doing.
So you know you're getting a kind of Hollywood eyes version
of what the building really is.
But on the other hand, you should have with field notes
and your photos and the other, the actual condition.
And you can compare and see, well, how much do you want to rely
on this drawing all by itself.
Male Speaker: You still have to develop the guidelines for it
and any suggestions you have, please send to us and to Mark [phonetic]
between now and March, we hope to sort it out,
and which level, is that correct to say?
Female Speaker: Well, level two has been defined in many ways,
but I think that would be.
The idea is to make it more basic, more simple, convey what's important
and maybe even get back to the Beaux Arts style of drawing,
where composition was a big part of what they were trying to achieve.
And we found a way to get students.
We're hoping to maybe find a way to get to architects,
who might have learned by that tradition and maybe have the time
to do one sheet, but isn't going to do a complete set.
So that's something.
Male Speaker: A big exercise for Beaux Arts architects to do that,
to get everything, you know the principal elements onto one sheet.
Comporting that with HABS standards is something we have to deal with,
but if any of you have models that you think we could come
across of the single-sheet presentation for a building
that you think have excellent qualities, feel free to let me know
about it in the next several months.   My e-mail is cpea@loc.gov.
Female Speaker: Okay I need to interrupt for a minute.
We could possibly take another question or two.
But there's a bus for the students and their professors will be
at the Peterson prize award leaves in just a few minutes.
It won't leave without you if you're not there,
but you need to gather together and proceed
down to the Independence Avenue entrance.
And, Kathy [phonetic], did you have a question before?
Female Speaker: Yes.
My question is regard to mitigation issues.
I'm involved a lot with mitigation in Pennsylvania, and I have
yet to see HABS, HAIR photographs or drawings recommended for mitigation.
And in fact the state yesterday, when I went to a conference,
said that they do not require documentation as part
of their mitigation for section 106.
So we're losing resources without any proper documentation.
And I wonder if there's any way to reintegrate HABS hair or some level
of that with mitigation and resources that are being lost.
Female Speaker: I mean yeah.   Thank you for asking that question.
That is a huge issue for us.
We could take a whole other day to talk about that.
But we'd like to try to get back the mitigation that we're losing.
And the states are stipulating that.
And we need to get a handle on that process.
We will accept anything that is sent to us,
regardless of whether it's landmark quality, but mitigation is something
that we need to investigate.
So yes, hopefully that will change in the future.
Walker [phonetic]?
Male Speaker: Do you accepted any models in the collection?
Male Speaker: We have a few that came in with archives,
but because it's not one of our specialties,
our conservators don't do that.
We generally try to place them with another institution
that is better equipped to deal with them, and then link it.
Did that answer your question?   Male Speaker: Yes.
Female Speaker: Do we have any more questions?
[ Applause ]
Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.   Visit us at loc.gov.