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.