Historical Collections and Labor Archives

The Making of America II is a Digital Library Federation project to continue and extend research and demonstration projects that have begun to develop best practices for the encoding of intellectual, structural, and administrative data about primary resources housed in research libraries. The project investigates important issues in the creation of an integrated, but distributed, digital library of archival materials (i.e., digitized surrogates of primary source materials found in archives and special collections).

The Making of America II Testbed Project collection is "Transportation, 1869-1900," particularly the development of the railroads and their relationship to the cultural, economic, and political development of the country.

Participants in this grant are Cornell University, New York Public Library, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, and University of California at Berkeley. The University of California at Berkeley's Library produced a variety of tools to support the capture of administrative and structural metadata during the creation of digitized archival materials, the transmission of administrative and structural metadata regarding such materials, and the display of digitized materials to archive users.

Penn State chose to digitize portions of two collections: the Pennsylvania Bridges Collection, 1884-1915, photographs and technical drawings of railroad bridges mostly in the Pittsburgh area; and the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen Local 160 Records, 1884-1927, selected correspondence, minute books, cashbooks, and attendance roll books.

For more information about the Making of America II project, see the MOA2 website at the University of California, Berkeley.