Engineering Reports

Last Thursday, Ed and I went to the Library of Michigan (yet again!) to look over the MDOT reports that Bernadette was able to get for us. I was so excited to finally get our hands on these plans!

Ed and I skimmed through the Engineering Reports and think that they will be extremely useful for our project, especially involving the planning of the highway. The reports contain a lot of aerial maps for the interstate and mentions an alternate route that we have been looking everywhere for. The reports we have are the Engineering Report 1588 and Engineering Report 1588 Supplement 2. We don't have the first supplement, but supplement 2 is supposed to be the "newest" information. The report lays out the reasons why they chose the area they did for the interstate and breaks down the costs for the recommended area and the alternate area (which were actually fairly close in estimates).

I am very grateful that Bernadette was able to get these documents for us and spend so much time trying to help us find information for our project. After looking through these engineering reports, I really think that our project is coming together and finishing up.

Library of Michigan

On Tuesday, Ed, Riley, and myself went to the Library of Michigan to begin our research into the planning of I-496. We enlisted the help of a librarian right away but there was a little miscommunication between us. At first, she thought we were looking into the highway I-96 which we repeatedly told her we were looking at I-496, specifically in Lansing. There just happened to be a folder labeled "Highways - 1950s and 1960s" on her desk when we got there because another librarian was using it earlier in the day for an unrelated question. We skimmed through the articles in that folder and didn't find very many that had to do with I-496 but we found out that there was a separate folder that had clippings exclusively on I-496. While Ed and Riley went to check out other stuff, I located this folder and began to skim through and make copies of some relevant articles and pictures that I thought could be useful for our project.

Copying the articles was a huge pain and I wish I would have thought about bringing my camera to make the copies which would have been much easier to do and upload to Omeka or the Wiki (and I wouldn't have had to deal with the lady that kicked me off the copier while I was using it, but that's a different story). I wasn't able to copy all of the articles in the folder that I wanted to because the Library was closing but I will go back and finish looking. After Dr. K scans in the articles as PDF's, I will read them for content and upload what I think is necessary to our project site at Omeka.

Research for the I-496 Project

For our class project I have been assigned to the research team. Tomorrow, the research group I am in is going to the Library of Michigan to begin looking at documents for our project. Ed, Riley, Michelle and myself are looking for planning documents for the highway including alternate routes that were debated. We are going to be looking for maps, documents, pictures, newspaper articles and anything else that might relate to our topic.

Tomorrow is just the beginning. Because of the limited hours, we are probably going to have to go back at some point to continue our search but we want to begin digging in to see what we find. We have looked at the background readings that everyone did for specific document names that might be helpful but I plan on asking the librarians there to help us out if we need it.

I will update later with what we find (which hopefully will be a lot!)