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.

Under Pressure...

Now that it's April, I'm really starting to feel the pressure for all of my classes, especially this one. I feel like there is still so much to do for our class project, even though it seems we have accomplished a lot. I'm not really sure how far away we are from our end goal and what else we still need to find. On top of our class project, the individual project is looming overhead. I know it is a huge task and I'm worried that there isn't enough time left in the semester! I have some ideas on what I want to do but I really need to just narrow it down and get started. I'm hoping we can finish our class project soon so that I can devote all my spare time (which seems to be very little) to working on this individual project. I'll update on my progress...

Visit to the Capitol Area District Library

Today, Riley and I went to the Capitol Area District Library in Lansing. Our goal was to try and find city council minutes in the local history part of the library which is only open from 5-7 on Tuesdays. When we arrived, the door was locked and no one was in there. After talking to the librarians at the circulation desk we found out that the people that were usually in charge of the place weren't there. Luckily, they were able to find someone in the building to help us. Because of budget cuts, people have to work in two places.

We didn't really have any luck in finding the city council minutes, even with some of the dates we wrote down from our timeline. However, the person that was helping us found some plans for the building of I-496 which included neighborhoods and specific lots where construction took place. Each street was broken down into different lots and listed in a table. We are trying to get scans or even just pictures of the documents to show the rest of the class and use for our project. As we get more information, we will update the class.

We also were directed towards a folder with newspaper clippings from the Lansing State Journal about I-496. We skimmed through the contents and found some new articles and photos that we thought might be helpful to our project. We will read through them for content and upload whatever is helpful to the wiki and Omeka. We also found out that the library has aerial photographs of the I-496 area including one dated around 1948 which is a great before picture. We are going to talk to the man in charge of the photos to see if we can get copies of those pictures.

All in all, I thought our trip was pretty successful. Although we didn't really find what we thought we were going to find, I think we found a good amount of material.

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.