Beyond Steel Digital
Archive Launched
Beyond
Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture
was launched on August 31, 2007. With an emphasis on
industry and society, the web site highlights the Lehigh
Valley's mid-nineteenth-century boom, late twentieth-century
decline and community readjustment. Through the digitization
and presentation of letters, books, photographs, maps,
essays, and oral histories the site will aid researchers in
understanding not only the lives of railroad barons and
steel titans, but also the experiences of average folks who
worked and lived in the community.
At the center of the Valley is Bethlehem Steel, in many ways
a driving force in the study of industrial dominance and
decline. With the company’s shift from iron rails to an
emphasis on battleship armor plate and large naval guns, it
became quite profitable and, by the early twentieth century,
was the area's major employer. Still others worked outside
of the framework of Bethlehem Steel and comprised much of
the fabric of the community. Visit the site
here. Professor
John Kenley Smith will introduce the site at a jointly
sponsored program at 12 noon on Wednesday, October 24th
in the Humanities Forum, Linderman Library, room 200.
The historical resources that exist collectively among area
institutions tell this rich story. Along with Lehigh
University Special Collections’ holdings, materials were
contributed by the Bethlehem Area Public Library, Hagley
Museum and Library, Historic Bethlehem Partnership, Lehigh
County Historical Society, Moravian Archives, National Canal
Museum, St. Luke’s Hospital and Health Network, and the
Steelworkers’ Archives. The project represents nearly three
years of planning, digitizing, and designing by Lehigh
University’s S. Murray Rust Jr. Digital Scholarship Center
located in Linderman Library.
A Growing Scholarly Resource
Beyond Steel will continue to add materials, and to
seek additional resources, that tell the story of how coal,
canals, railroads, iron and steel converged in the making of
an industrial community. For instance, the Rust Digital
Scholarship Center was recently awarded a grant to digitize,
process, and deliver significant geospatial information that
will enable researchers to view socio-economic patterns over
space and time through the implementation of GIS (Geographic
Information Systems) to reconstruct early twentieth century
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Data will be derived from 1912
Sanborn fire insurance maps of Bethlehem, the 1900-1901
“Directory of the Bethlehems”, 1900-1902 Bethlehem Steel
employee lists, and the census data. The result, available
in May 2008, will be a geospatial presentation of turn of
the century Bethlehem population and a context for more
specialized visualization of workers in the steel industry.
-- Julia Maserjian
Article posted August
2007
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