Draft Narrative

From ENHLDWiki

Reviewers, please note: The "fine print" at the top of each section is the language in the grant description for that topic. In addition to making comments on the discussion page, please feel very free to add things to the To Do List.

Limit the narrative to twenty-five single-sided and single-spaced pages. All pages should have one-inch margins and the font size should be no smaller than eleven point. Use appendices to provide supplementary material. Individuals with a variety of professional backgrounds will read these applications and advise NEH on their merits. Project narratives should, therefore, be written so that they can be understood by persons who may not have the same technical awareness as the applicant. Note: as of 6:00 pm 2/19/07, this Narrative is at 17 printable pages.

Files

• NEH Digital Products Form

Abbreviations and Definitions

• CPR: Butte Citizens for Preservation and Revitalization, the applicant.
• NHL: National Historic Landmark
• NHLD: National Historic Landmark District
• BAW NHLD: Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville National Historic Landmark District
• VHS: Virtual Historic Savannah
• Butte-Silver Bow (BSB): The local consolidated city-county government
• SHPO: Montana State Historic Preservation Office

Any trade names, such as Google Earth™, are the property of their owners and are used herein for descriptive purposes only.

Description of the project and its significance

Provide a one-page abstract written for a non-specialist audience, clearly explaining the project's importance to the humanities, its principal activities, and its expected results.

This effort will bring to life the rich and colorful history of Butte, Montana. New, easy to use internet-based media will safely house, collect and display contextual and interconnected historical information that currently rests in the memories of residents, dusty pictures and scattered records. The largest historic district in the United States intends to lead in creating a bridge across the gap between old photos and tattered newspapers and broad understanding of our cultural and industrial heritage.

The project compiles diverse historical and current information on and photographs of the 6,015 contributing properties in the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville National Historic Landmark District, and formats them into both small pop-up pages and much more detailed linked pages for access through a Google Earth featured content interface (elaborated below, under "Enhancing humanities through innovative & emerging technologies"). Using Wikipedia-like interactivity, scholars for the project can easily upload information that will ultimately be available to all broadband Internet-connected computers and will also be available in stand-alone kiosks in research institutions and tourist centers in southwest Montana.

The recent enlargement of the BAW NHLD to the largest in the nation by contributing property count has generated new enthusiasm focused on preserving and interpreting Butte's unique, endangered, and internationally important multi-ethnic cultural, industrial, and labor history. Using Virtual Historic Savannah as inspiration, the project will employ and embrace new technologies (Google Earth, for example, has been generally accessible for under 2 years) that permit faster and more intuitive use of spatially oriented data (i.e., the locations of the 6,015 properties) within their historic and cultural context of place and time.

The project will integrate sub-topics of history including ethnic heritage, housing architecture, industrial architecture and labor history, and social development into an easy-to-use (and more importantly, easy to understand) framework. Integration is at the heart of the project concept: to weave a web that connects a physical structure with its inhabitants and their heritage.

Using the historic properties and landmarks themselves as the visible starting point, this web will be based on two overarching themes:

Labor and industrial history

• Multiple web pages detailing the political and business battles that built copper-mining empires
• Interlinkages to specific events that can connect back to specific structures (for example, the Anaconda Road Massacre can be told in the context of the buildings that witnessed the event).
• Relationships among physical industrial structures (headframes, mine dumps, railroad) and their surrounding neighborhoods. In many cases first-person accounts (already extant, but in hand-written single copy) will enhance the connection between physical features and the human story.

Ethnic and social history

• Class as expressed in living situations - shanties, hotels, homes, mansions, all of which contribute to the NHLD.
• Details of daily life found in historic structures, ranging from places of worship to banks, saloons, barbershops, speakeasy, and jail. For example, the Synagogue would link to the story of Butte's firsr mayor, a Jew, and to his house, the oldest brick home in the NHLD. In turn, this will lead to the regulations passed in his administration to restrict construction to brick, after a series of damaging fires.

The key element of scholarship contributed by our historians will be the interconnectedness of a vast volume of information. As the visitor explores our web, a sense of both the people and the place will emerge.

The model we create for the BAW NHLD will lend itself to enlargement immediately through the Wikimedia interface; we will produce a demonstration project for a small number of NHLs or NHLDs scattered across the United States, anticipating the participation of historians and other professionals associated with many other NHLs in adding to our master database. We anticipate that this product will become no less than the primary, central access point via Google Earth for NHL and NHLD historical data for the entire country.

Collaboration among libraries (public and university), government organizations (archives, historic preservation officer and committee), museum (Mai Wah Museum of Chinese Heritage), universities (Montana Tech Professional & Technical Communications Department, Tech Historical Preservation Program, Montana State U. School of Architecture), and preservation and historical organizations (Butte CPR, Montana Historical Society, Montana SHPO) will provide for a unique model of integration and dissemination of diverse textual and image-based historic information.

The results of this work will be (1) an easy-to-use resource for historical information, and (2) more importantly, a vehicle for public understanding of and excitement about the interconnectedness of our historical landscape.

Substance and Context

Provide a clear and concise explanation of the project, the major issues to be addressed, how it is grounded in the humanities, and its value to scholars, students, professionals in cultural repositories, or general audiences. Describe the scope of the project and its relationship to other published and ongoing work in the field. Explain how the methodological approach is compatible with the intellectual goals of the project and the expectations and needs of its users.

Comprehensive information on National Historic Landmarks and National Historic Landmark Districts is hard to come by. There is no single resource of information available for the 130 NHLDs and 2500 NHL structures. Some information resides in isolated and difficult to search repositories scattered throughout the nation; much available information has been compiled by non-professional organizations such as tourist bureaus, chambers of commerce, and private promotional groups. Other information lives entirely in the knowledge or private collections of local historians. With few exceptions the information, when available, lacks the contextual benefit of location. The architecture of NHL structures is captured only in photographs, or worse yet, only available on physical inspection; photographs alone lack the context of neighboring structures and the dimension of time.

Beginning with the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville National Historic Landmark District, the eNHLD.org project will provide a comprehensive resource on National Historic Landmarks and National Historic Landmark Districts and give that information new context buy showing relative geographic location, 3D modeling, and historical framework. The information will be further enhanced through the addition of additional sources such as oral histories, photographs and current uses of NHL structures. The system will also benefit from additional historical context in the form of other related histories that help tell the story of another NHL or a larger NHLD.

Our goals are simple in concept. We wish to provide a robust system for organizing and enriching the volumes of information for NHLDs and NHLs. Our goal is to make a system that is accessible to the common user as well as a valuable and trusted resource for the historian and professional. We wish to enrich the available information by providing additional contexts to the data through 3D architectural models and demonstration of geo-spatial relationships. We wish to disseminate this data into widely used communities to drive traffic and interest.

The history of the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville National Historic Landmark District is well documented in dozens of books. This deep cultural and industrial history provides the rich underpinning -- the grounding in the humanities -- that serves as the basis for our proposed work. As the largest NHLD in the nation, and one whose contribution to ethnic, business, and governmental development in the United States is immense, Butte and its related communities serve as a microcosm of America: "No Smoking" signs in mines in 14 languages, a corrupt corporate-owned legislature that led to the direct election of US Senators, and labor and union developments in the "Gibraltar of Unionism" that presaged such efforts across the country, all comprise the history that is directly related to the 6,015 properties we propose to delineate and whose heritage we intend to make quickly and easily accessible, within an easily understood and interactive web of historic contexts.

The value to scholars, historians, government officials and employees concerned with historic preservation and urban planning, architects, historic preservation non-profits, local cultural tourism promoters, professors and students around the globe is undeniable. Instead of needing to visit far-flung and poorly organized repositories of information the information of importance would be a click away. The project will provide significant additional context to the information. On the surface the researched information will be compiled into a structure-by-structure history. But beyond that history will be links to the primary material as well as 3D models of the structures detailing architectural elements in their historic and neighborhood context. Those models will be placed in a widely available and easy to use 3D environment where the larger effect of the architectures of multiple contributing properties can be fully appreciated.

The scope of this proposal is to build the entirety of this system and populate it. The core data set of the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville National Historic Landmark District will populate the system. The BAW NHLD is the largest NHLD in the United States with 6,015 contributing structures. Other structures and sites that add to the history of the immediate area such as headframes, the Berkeley Pit, Columbia Gardens, and others will also be included to further complement and complete the history.

The system will be built in its entirety and will be ready for all data from all NHLDs across the country. After the system is built and the original data for BAW NHLD are entered, the system will be ready for the other NHLDs. Some further work on the system may be required to insure that the system is ready for the influx of new traffic associated with the expanded scope of information, but on the whole it will be complete. During that period our team will establish all the NHLDs in the system and populate them with a small sampling of contributing structures. The team will network with interested and qualified persons at nationwide historical sites to expand and complete the information for their NHLD or NHLs.

The eNHLD.org project will not be the first attempt to put NHLD information on the web, nor the first attempt to provide a model of a historic neighborhood. A previous project, Virtual Historic Savannah, built a website to give 3D walking tour information for the Savannah NHLD. The Savannah NHLD is smaller, about one third the size of the BAW NHLD. VHS uses what appears to be an entirely proprietary system to render the city in 3D. The final result, while intriguing in premise and excellent in content, is unwieldy. Even at the highest available connection speeds at top academic institutions it can take minutes to perform even the most simple actions. The eNHLD.org project will provide much deeper information than VHS and will perform substantially better. This is because the intensive 3D rendering of architectural models and the special representations of those models will be done with widely available stand-alone tools such as Google Earth. Google Earth will not only serve as an already robust platform for the display of geo-located data and 3D environment, it will also serve as an alternative interface to the data on the eNHLD.org website. Our data will also get ported to commonly used internet resources such as Wikipedia.org. This cross-pollination of data on other systems such as Google Earth (as featured content) and Wikipedia.org also dramatically increases the exposure of the project. Utilizing pre-built applications will give us a huge advantage over the proprietary process used in VHS by keeping costs in line. Those savings can be routed to expanding the scope beyond BAW NHLD.

Importance of your collaboration

Provide a concise description of the organizations and/or entities that are collaborating on the project. Describe the strengths of each contributor and how this joint effort will make the project stronger. Discuss the ways in which the collaboration can serve as a model for other humanities organizations. If applicable, discuss any planned partnerships with private sector organizations.

The applicant, Butte CPR, is a 13-year-old grass-roots volunteer organization dedicated to providing education about and awareness of Butte's historic architecture, and how to preserve it. In 2007, Butte-Silver Bow enacted a new, comprehensive Historic Preservation Ordinance to bring the community into compliance with the Certified Local Government program, fulfilling one of the main goals of the CPR and allowing the organization to focus on other, wider programs such as this project. This new ordinance, together with the 2006 expansion of the BAW NHLD, is producing both awareness and excitement regionally about history, and this project concept is a direct result of that excitement and impetus. It is inconceivable to attempt a project of this scope without collaboration with other entities in the area that are focused on other aspects of history in the BAW NHLD.

For many years diverse local and regional organizations have worked, sometimes in partnership but often alone, to discover and disseminate information about the history of the NHLD. This project will ambitiously connect those organizations in a comprehensive effort to unify the information into a user-friendly product that will serve both the general public and professional researchers. By engaging organizations within the City-County government (Public Archives, Historic Preservation Officer, Public Library), regional historic organizations (Butte CPR, Montana Historic Society and SHPO), historic museums (Mai Wah), and university professionals (Montana Tech PTC and COT, Montana Tech Library, MSU School of Architecture), we will ensure the professional integrity of the content and will establish connections that will make for wide dissemination of the project regionally in the form of the dedicated kiosks for "Virtual Historic Butte".

The project connects to the private sector in its dependence on local expertise for project management, historians, and computer technology. All the primary personnel listed elsewhere in this narrative are professionals in their fields. We also list as collaborator a private firm whose architectural historians and cultural resource specialists will provide technical advice to our team of historians. In addition to these private sector relationships, we will likely apply for corporate funding both as potential matching for this grant as well as for sustainability after the two-year term of this grant expires.

We intend that this project will demonstrate how a relatively small organization can leverage collaborative relationships among diverse but related organizations and dedicated individuals to produce a local product that will be easily implemented on a national scale for all National Historic Landmarks and NHLDs.

Butte Archives and Butte GIS Department

Collaboration is critical to all phases of this project. The two central facets of the work, historic research and computer technology implementation, rely most importantly on existing information prepared by the Butte Archives. The Archives' database contains information such as year built, architecture, architect, occupancy, and associations (e.g., banking, labor, ethnic groups) for each of the 6,015 contributing properties in the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville NHLD; it will be the job of our historians to compile these basic data into the historic context of the NHLD, and to significantly expand it with primary resources including existing first-person narratives, related newspaper accounts, and historic and modern photos.

The Archives' database, in Microsoft Access format, is already linked to the Butte-Silver Bow County cadastral GIS system, an ArcInfo-based system. It will be the job of our computer technologists to interlink that connection with our Google Earth-compatible files. Historians and computer technologists will then work together to prepare both the small Google Earth pop-up pages and the much more extensive multiple interlinked pages supporting the Google Earth pages.

Ellen Crain (resume attached) is a professional historian, and has been Director of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives for 15 years. She and her staff will be directly involved in the historic research, both as an information resource and as a guide for our contract historians. She will guide our interactions with the existing database and the GIS system; as a collaborator, the Archives will also provide access to primary historical materials described above. Of these, the most important is the archive of historical photographs. As described in the section on digital materials, most (est. 90%) but probably not all of the images we would use under this grant will be in digital form by the time the grant period begins (see also Specifications For Projects That Develop Digital Products).

The Butte-Silver Bow County GIS Department is listed as a collaborator so that we can accommodate the time that personnel in that department will devote to our project.

Architecture

Professional oversight for the important architectural elements of our work will be provided though a collaboration with Dr. Maire O'Neill (resume attached), Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Montana State University, Bozeman; Dr. O'Neill will serve as a consultant to the project.

Local expertise in architectural history and cultural resource evaluation is provided by a private-sector organization, Renewable Technologies, Inc. One of the principals in this company, Mary McCormick (resume attached), is an architectural historian with extensive experience in Butte, in particular with National Register properties; she will serve as a technical advisor to our staff.

In addition, during the second year of the grant period, students (listed under computer data technicians in the budget) will be engaged to provide 3-D architectural drawings important for the visualization aspects of our Google Earth implementation. They will use SketchUp software, freely available and specifically designed to create renderings compatible with Google Earth. This work will be overseen by our Computer Technology Manager, Max Detjens, to ensure correct dovetailing of file formats.

Historic Photography

In addition to the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, we will rely on collaborators at the Montana Historical Society and the Montana State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). Mr. Brian Shovers, a professional historian and manager of the MHS Library, has extensive direct experience with Butte together with many pertinent publications of his own; he will provide valuable guidance to our historical research, and other staff at the MHS will help with finding appropriate historical photos in the extensive MHS collection. The SHPO has additional files on National Register properties that will be integrated with all other historical research. Rolene Schliesman, an architectural historian with the SHPO, has extensive experience with National Register properties and the Certified Local Government program and will also advise our historians. Our budget includes both time for SHPO and MHS personnel and cost of reproduction of historic photographs.

Design and Implementation

Dr. Bill Macgregor (resume attached), Professor in the Professional & Technical Communications (PTC) Department at Montana Tech, Butte, will assist in review of the human interface in our project, especially the design, navigability, and user-friendliness of the web pages we develop. In addition, Dr. Macgregor's classes regularly work on "mini-internship" projects to support extramural activities within the community, and we plan to take advantage of that hands-on training situation to provide for real-world experience for college students while obtaining significant assistance in both research and computer technology.

Historic Preservation

Another element of Montana Tech, the Historic Preservation Program of the College of Technology, led by Mr. Steve Luft Assistant Dean and Head, Trades and Technical Department, will support, on a consulting basis, elements of the extensive background pages linked from the Google Earth starting points. Inasmuch as preservation is a critical element of NHLDs and National Register properties, and is also a priority for long-neglected and endangered historic properties in Butte, we intend to showcase examples of success stories (as well as failures) and provide a basic fabric for how preservation can be accomplished. This goal is central to the objectives of the Butte CPR, and is an important motivation for this grant application. We plan to apply for support for this aspect of the project from the National Park Service National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

In the same connection, our collaboration with the Butte-Silver Bow Historic Preservation Officer (Mr. Mark Reavis; resume attached) and the Butte-Silver Bow Historic Preservation Commission will dovetail with the needs and goals of Butte's new (2007) Historic Preservation Ordinance. The Historic Preservation Officer, who is also an architect, will provide significant expertise, including architectural history of properties; the Historic Preservation Commission is listed as a minor collaborator in this project. The role of this citizen volunteer advisory panel will be promotional, and to provide guidance in terms of historic preservation issues. Our project overlaps with the Commission's mandate to maintain an inventory of Butte's historic properties, and to provide education about them. While the current project will not directly provide significant input to that government-sponsored activity, we anticipate beneficial interaction as the two projects proceed; our project will provide an outstanding background upon which the County's survey and inventory can be based and grow.

Museums and Libraries

Museums and libraries are at the heart of our vision for local dissemination of this work. Even though the project will be accessible through any Internet broadband-connected computer, we feel that it is critical for stand-alone access to be publicly available in research centers. This element of the project represents the only significant investment in equipment: the touch-screen kiosks that will assist both researchers in library settings and encourage and inform tourists and other visitors in places like airports.

In three cases (Mai Wah Society Museum, Montana Tech Library, and Butte Public Library) the collaborators will be more than end users; each has unique resources important to the full integration of the historical, cultural, and architectural fabric of Butte's development that we plan to make widely available. Together with the Butte Archives, these facilities hold primary research sources such as newspapers, theses, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, and first-person narratives of residents of many of the properties we will study and include in the final product.

The national and international importance of Butte has been recognized by the National Park Service in their support for the 2006 expansion of the Landmark District to the largest in the nation by contributing property count, but a major lack remains in getting that story told in an easily accessible way. Through the collaboration of the diverse organizations listed here -- archives, museums, libraries, government agencies, universities, and preservation-centered organizations -- we will bring this importance to the world in an engaging and informative manner.

History and Duration of the project

Provide a concise history of the project, including information about preliminary research or planning, previous related work and products, and previous financial support. If a project will take more than two years to complete, describe the scope and duration of the entire project, as well as the specific accomplishments or products intended for the proposed grant period. Describe probable sources of support for subsequent phases of the project.

The project was inspired by Virtual Historic Savannah [1], a resource providing for online information about the 2,000+ historic properties in the Savannah Historic District. The interface there was developed specifically for that project, which was supported by NEH and other funding. With the advent of newer technologies, specifically Google Earth and MediaWiki software, opportunties for providing access to diverse kinds of spatial data have increased exponentially.

Google Earth, available for less than two years, now embraces third-party information, such as the "featured content" layers provided by National Geographic, Smithsonian, Discovery Channel, and others. We see an opportunity to provide visual and textual historic information using the small "featured content" pop-ups contained within Google Earth KML files, which in turn will lead to in-depth web sites outside of Google Earth. Initially, we propose to create this system for the Butte-Anaconda-Walkerville NHLD because with its 6,015 contributing properties, it is now by far the largest in the United States.

Beyond Butte, we will create a demonstration project to illustrate the power of a wiki-style interface for distant students to input their own information into the master eNHLD space, using the simple and immediate, yet always editable format of Wikipedia (but with limited authorized personnel to eliminate vandalism).

Preliminary work and Existing Situations. Our historians (resumes attached) have worked with historical data in Butte for approximately 25 person-years; our collaborators add decades more. The existing database created by the Butte Archives as part of the nomination for the NHLD expansion in 2006 will serve as the basis for this project, but will be expanded significantly with first-person narratives, historic and modern photography, approaches to historic preservation, and the overall context of properties in Butte's history. The database is already linked to the Butte-Silver Bow Cadastral GIS mapping system, and we plan to take advantage of that existing linkage. By the time the grant term begins (if funded), at least 90% of the historic imagery to be derived from the Butte Archives will have been selected and digitized, so digitizing of existing media is not a part of this proposal except in the case of a few unidentified images. This digitizing work is underway now (Spring 2007).

Domain names related to eNHLD have been purchased, and an internal Wiki has been set up within which all particpants in the project can contribute. The Wiki allows for quick comparison of content, mutual editing of contributed research, and comment from all particpants on all aspects of the work. The Wiki was used for the collaborative creation of this application narrative.

Duration. The project is designed to be fully accomplished within the 2-year grant period. We are confident that our professional historians will document about 230 properties each per calendar quarter, and that our computer technologists will provide the necessary programming in an ongoing but timely basis to accommodate the narratives and photographs produced by the historians. It is possible that the work of creating the 3-D renderings of all 6,015 properties might extend beyond the 2-year term; if it does, that continuation would be contingent on subsequent or supplemental funding. The 3-D work will begin in the heart of the Butte Uptown business district where the most significant of the contributing properties are located.

Sustainability. When the product is "finished," new information will continue to be discovered. We plan to develop at least minimal grants to support what will otherwise be a labor of love (i.e., volunteer effort) on the part of several of the principal workers to maintain and incrementally update the information package for at least two years beyond the grant term. By then, if necessary, we could attempt to transfer the entire project to a dedicated non-profit or other organization committed to the continuation of the project. Also, when the project is complete (or sooner), we will be able to accept input from external historians associated with other NHLs and NHLDs, broadening the possibilities for sustaining the project. In the long term, primary costs will be annual server leasing, and database and web maintenance. None of these costs (estimated at under $15,000 per year) would be beyond the means of many small non-profit organizations. Grant applications for sustainability beyond the two-year term of this grant would begin as soon as the NEH grant was funded (Sept. 2007). Seven specific grant possibilities, listed below, have been identified as potential support for the part of this grant that would not be funded by NEH; several of them are also likely candidates for support in terms of ongoing sustainability.

• NPS NCPTT (Dec. 2007)
• NEH Interp. America’s Hist. Places (Sept. 2007)
• BSB Economic Development Grant (Oct. 2007, Oct. 2008)/other local government
• CPR cash (fund-raising campaign/donations)
• National Trust grants (Feb. 2008)
• Butte-Arco Redevelopment Trust
• Montana Cultural Trust (FY 2009)

Enhancing humanities through innovative & emerging technologies

Google Earth user sees yellow National Geographic rectangles; we would have our own logo. Upon clicking a building in the BAW NHLD, an initial screen such as the one below would emerge. Click the image to see full size.

Draft example of the small initial pop-up page that results from clicking on a property in Google Earth. Click the image to see full size. Blue links take the user out of Google Earth and into our detailed website with information on the specific property as well as deep background context.

This project breaks with the traditional approach to this kind of application. Our approach will utilize existing and increasingly popular technologies such as Google Earth and WikiMedia. With this springboard we will be able to embrace a much larger mission, produce a system that is far more useful to the end user, and create a system that is that is far easier to use.

Historically an interactive 3D web application would be developed from scratch. Such an approach would likely make use of a client-side web technology such as JavaScript, flash, java, or VRML. The effort involved to produce even the most primitive result is enormous. The closest philosophical relative to the eNHLD.org project is Virtual Historic Savannah. That project utilized a VRML client. While the results of this project are impressive, the approach endued it with some serious limitations. The project requires an awkward installation for the most common browser, is prohibitively slow to load even with the best connections, utilizes an unintuitive interface, and to a large extent fails to provide historical context.

This is not a criticism of the Virtual Historic Savannah team. The task before them was indeed daunting. The VHS team did a wonderful job with the limitations of the technologies available to them half a decade ago.

Fortunately, technology is ever advancing and now we have the opportunity to go further. Key aspects of our approach will hinge on the use of a widely available, friendly to use, extremely popular, interface that easily accepts third-party content and add-ons, and has an extensive existing installed user base. Google Earth boasts all of those attributes and because of its popularity will draw additional attention and interest from both casual viewers and professional historians; Google Earth is finding increasing use by professional earth and life scientists (see, for example, Geotimes, Feb. 2007, p. 38), including the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, United Nations Environmental Project, US Geological Survey real-time Stream Flow Sensor Net, AntWeb's catalog of ant locations, and more. Google Earth is ripe for a richly interconnected application in the humanities such as this proposal. Only a few such uses are apparent today (Spring 2007), including "History Illustrated" which provides an online documentary of the wives of Henry VIII, among other things.

A draft example for our project is in the image at right; the blue links would work like any hyperlink, taking the user into the deeper, interconnected thematic elements behind this particular building.

Methodology and standards

Explain and justify the process, procedures, and standards that will be used to carry out the project. Proposals that include converting non-digital material to digital format, creating new digital content, or repurposing of existing digital content must include the Specifications For Projects That Develop Digital Products form (Attachment 7 pdf). Discuss how humanities scholars and other appropriate professionals working as a team, will guide the project in developing procedures, best practices, or national standards, and how any products will reflect their contributions. If a prototype or test bed will be created, indicate how its scope and content will be appropriate to the goals of the project. Discuss how materials or information will be organized, presented, and disseminated in a manner that reflects sound scholarship, accepted professional practices, and national standards pertinent to the project's materials and methods. If the methodology departs from accepted standards and procedures, explain why the project's goals require this approach and whether the results would be compatible with other resources that follow existing standards. Explain how the project will test the potential applicability of any innovative techniques and procedures that the project is likely to develop. Describe how the results of the project will be evaluated.

Application Development Model

The technology end is clearly divisible into multiple components. Some of those components such as Google Earth, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, SketchUp, and 3D Warehouse are already complete. The remaining components are the final web user website, internal data storage and retrieval architecture, kiosk interface, physical kiosk, scholars' interface, KML generating component, Wikipedia entry generating component, GIS information display, digitization of material, and 3D Model library. Those components are sufficiently modular that they can be developed with limited dependencies. Those dependencies make up a dependency web which will help guide the project through development.

The model of development will be a rapid iteration model. The skeleton of each component will be developed so that the whole breadth of its functionality is defined. In progressive passes the skeleton will be fleshed out until the final product is reached. The initial iterations will focus on the elements of a component that are considered the highest risk. This early attention will insure that the majority of design challenges are discovered and addressed early, and that needed modifications to the implementation can be made. Iterations will be informed by an agile development iteration model using feedback from the team of scholars and collaborators.

Some components such as the physical construction of internet ready kiosks and the digitization of material will have a differing process. The kiosks will be designed and then prototyped. Once a reproducible prototype is running copies will be made. The technical and scholarly staff will experiment with various digitization techniques and use the results to produce a methodology. Once the guideline is established scholars and data entry personnel will abide by that methodology for the digitization work.

Digital Procedures

See attached Specifications For Projects That Develop Digital Products form.

Historical Research

Standard approaches to historical research will focus on our primary resource, the Butte Archives. Additional research at the Montana Tech Library, Butte Public Library, Mai Wah Museum, and Montana Historical Society will expand both the information and the historical photography to be used in the project. Our professional historians will enjoy the oversight and review of both state (SHPO) and local (BSB Historic Preservation Officer and Historic Preservation Commission) compliance officials to ensure correct interconnection with National Park Service NHL and NHLD specifications. Historical review by many collaborators (Director of Butte Archives, personnel at Montana Historical Society, the professionals on our Advisory Board) will ensure proper interconnection of specifics with the broader context.

The fact that our product will be created using an interactive Wiki framework (already in place and being used for this grant application) will greatly enhance this continual internal review process, among the historians, collaborators, and reviewers. The relatively new WikiMedia approach to collaboration is an outstanding means for remote, but immediate, multi-user contribution and discussion of the topics of the project, and, as discussed elsewhere, will make the project the natural central clearinghouse for such collaboration among historians nationwide.

The ultimate presentation, as featured content in Google Earth linked to deep background context and detail, will also be created interactively by our team. Our Project Director and Tecnhical Director both have extensive experience with web page design, navigation, and maintenance. Additionally, the collaboration of the Montana Tech Professional and Technical Communication Department is intended to provide a level of oversight and review for this element of the project.

Meta Data

For both historical research and digitization (existing and new) tracks, we will start with existing formats and then collaboratively develop forms and procedures that are most applicable to the continuously interactive nature of our WikiMedia interface. As with the research itself, this will ensure that multiple minds, from diverse directions, have contributed to the creation of the forms that will constitute the meta data for the project.

Quantifying the Project's Utility

The concept that our project will serve as a prototype for dissemination of historical information about NHLs and NHLDs nationwide is quantifiable by the count of unrelated NHLs and NHLDs that embrace the project and contribute to it through our interactive WikiMedia interface. Web user statistics will quantify the project's popularity with the general public, and feedback from professional researchers (requested at locations where the kiosks are installed, as well as at professional conferences and via the web site itself) will address the project's utility for serious investigators.

Dissemination

Explain how the results of the project will be disseminated (e.g. print, electronic forms, presentations at professional meetings, etc.). Dissemination plans should include all appropriate professional audiences. If the primary audience is the general public, describe how the project will be publicized and made accessible. Discuss any intellectual property issues that might affect the availability of the materials. Describe the format of the project's final product and discuss its appropriateness to the subject matter and the intended audience. If relevant, discuss print or electronic publishing arrangements and provide an estimated price for the final product. Institutions receiving grants to create software are expected to publish or provide technical documentation concerning its development and implementation and to indicate plans for its continuing maintenance and updating. All institutions receiving grants are to create a "lessons learned" white paper. This white paper should document their project, including lessons learned, so that others can benefit from their experience.

The primary audience is the general public, but the comprehensive nature and ease of access will enhance professional use as well. The product will be accessible from any broadband-enabled Internet connection.

Three options will exist for access using Google Earth:

• Download the file from our website containing the NHLD information; when invoked, this file will engage the user's copy of Google Earth and will contain the information we provide.
• On Feb. 14, 2007, Google Earth announced a search function within Google Earth for Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files, the format we plan to create in this project. This will enable searchers to find our project without needing to come to our own web site.
• Our small nationwide demonstration product is intended to encourage other historians to provide content about other NHLs and NHLDs and thereby to make the package attractive to Google Earth, which would then officially embrace it and incorporate it into "everyone's" Google Earth.

In addition, both for the public and for researchers, dedicated information Kiosks placed at strategic locations around southwest Montana, with a focus on Butte-Anaconda, will provide access for researchers, local residents, and tourists. Planned locations include: Butte and Bozeman Airports, Butte Archives, Montana Tech Library, Butte Public Library, Library of Butte High School, Montana Historical Society in Helena, Mai Wah Museum, and World Museum of Mining. This access would be provided by the host's Internet connection and would be free for the user.

Presentations at professional meetings will be designed primarily to publicize the project, and secondarily to discover additional potential specialized historian contributors to the project. We are proposing a talk on this project at the Montana History Conference (October 2007, Helena, MT), and if the project is funded, it will form a valuable adjunct to the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF), a national conference planned for Butte in June 2009. Our Project Director, Richard Gibson, is the Chairman of the Tours & Guidebook Committee for the 2009 VAF Conference, enabling him to coordinate between the two activities, thereby enhancing both. The timing of the VAF Conference, in the final quarter of our project, will create an outstanding opportunity to promote the project to historians and historical architecture specialists from across the country. We have included a small allocation in the budget to support the publication of the VAF Butte 2009 Guidebook, a technical product of interest to historians, architects, and historic preservationists. This Guidebook will be available to all interested parties after the VAF conference.

We anticipate (but have not yet planned on) presenting the project to additional professional historical conferences as the work progresses and after it is complete, with the goal of engaging historians and others involved with NHLs and NHLDs across the United States.

We do not anticipate intellectual property issues, and we are not creating software but providing a unique interlinkage among existing cutting-edge techniques (Google Earth and MediaWiki). We are doing our collaborative work, including the preparation of the grant application, in an internal wiki, which enhances interaction and provides the permanant record of the project's development. This will serve as the core of the project-end "white paper" describing lessons learned: we will not have to re-create experiences from two years earlier, as the documentation will already exist.

Work Plan

Describe the specific tasks that will be accomplished during the grant period and the specific individuals who will be responsible for their completion. Include a schedule indicating what will be accomplished during each stage of the project. The activities described in the proposal should be completed by the end of the grant period. Reviewers will look at the viability, efficiency, and productivity of the work plan (which should include evaluation procedures).

The two primary tracks, historical research and technology development, will proceed concurrently. The principal secondary track, building the 3-D models, will also proceed concurrent with the primary tracks. Technology development is dependent on some content, which will be ready within a matter of days from funding (or before). Building the 3-D models can proceed independently, until late-stage integration with the Google Earth files we build. Models built before integration will be uploaded to 3Dwarehouse where they will be available to the public.

Specific Tasks

Historians. Research procedures are outlined in the "Historical Research" section under Methodology and Standards. Specific tasks are: export basic data about a property from the Butte Archives' data base; determine existence of other information (historic newspaper articles, historic photography, first-person accounts, etc.); assign or obtain modern digital photograph(s); write the integrated summary for the property, with proper integration to broader contextual web pages.

Computer Technology.

• Build end-user web site, considering overall look and feel, navigation, usability, accessibility, search-engine optimization
• Devise Website Architecture and Data Model for data storage and retrieval, and formatting for KML/KMZ (Google Earth) compatibility.
• Devise content-provider input format, including compatibility with eventual Wikipedia export.
• Build Google Earth Display Format, including considerations as to other integrated spatial information.
• Input data into site - the eventual goal is that this step will be simple, and can be the last step in the research/writing of historians.
• Copy Data From Site to Wikipedia, and get included in "everyone's" Google Earth - these are largely marketing issues, but the content and look and feel of the product will be critical to obtaining these inclusions.
• Open project to other contributors, considering scaling factors for size and procedures for restricting access for input to authorized personnel.
• Create 3D building models - does not depend directly on other elements of the work until near the end when porting to Google Earth would occur. This step will be accomplished to the extent funding allows, beginning with most important parts of the area; continuation will be dependent on supplemental funding.

Evaluation Procedures

Historical Content. Through our WikiMedia interface, described elsewhere, all content will be under continuous review by all participants in the project. The Project Director will perform evaluations of content and project status on a monthly basis, to report to the Advisory Board, and will coordinate and ensure that collaborators with a review capacity perform their evaluations regularly, within the Wiki already set up as a workspace for the project. We will develop specific formulas and checksheets for content (e.g., have appropriate newspaper articles been checked?, has the modern photo been obtained?); again, the Wiki approach will mean that we will not have to deal with notebooks full of paper forms covering the 6000 properties, but will have electronic information visible to all participants at all times.

Computer Technology. Web site design, content input, and storage and retrieval techniques will all be tested continually by non-technical users: our historians. Specific overview and evaluation is one of the Project Director's jobs, and collaboration with the Montana Tech Professional and Technical Communication Department will provide outside evaluation as well.

Milestones

Historical Research. Three professional historians will research, integrate, and write up in html-ready (or html when possible) format, narratives, including photographs and other supporting material, for 220-250 properties per calendar quarter, ensuring completion by the close of the eight calendar quarters of grant support. This number is reasonable inasmuch as many properties may have minimal information plus a modern photo; a relatively small number (estimated at 25%) of total properties will require extensive research.

Computer Technology. Many of these items will overlap in time, and most will be developed somewhat concurrently and all will evolve beyond the times given here, as the project advances. The time milestones given below are broad expressions of the timeline.

• Build end-user web site: Months 1-4
• Devise Website Architecture and Data Model: Months 3-9
• Devise content-provider input format: one level of this is already created, in our project Wiki. Funding will mean that we will create standardized on-line (in the wiki) metadata forms, page design, and content elements. Months 2-6
• Build Google Earth Display Format: Months 6-14
• Input data into site: Continuous after 4 months (or sooner - as soon as input and end-user web sites are designed) - Months 4-24
• Copy Data From Site to Wikipedia, and get included in "everyone's" Google Earth - months 12-24
• Create 3D building models - Months 1-24
• Open project to other contributors: Months 18-24

Fiscal Accountability. In addition to internal oversight provided by the Grant Administrator and Project Director, the project's Advisory Board will review quarterly financial reports prior to official submission to NEH. Ultimate fiscal oversight will come from the Treasurer of the Butte CPR.

Staff

Identify the project director, scholars, and collaborators who would work on the project during the proposed grant period, and describe their responsibilities and qualifications. Provide résumés for the principal collaborators (maximum of two pages each) in an appendix. Project directors must devote a significant portion of their time to their projects. All persons directly involved in the conduct of the proposed project—whether or not their salaries are paid from grant funds—should be listed, their anticipated commitments of time should be indicated, and the reasons for and nature of their collaboration explained. If the project has an advisory board, provide a statement of its function and a list of board members.

Resumes for the specific personnel listed here, including the named individuals from collaborating organizations, are found in the appendix.

Project Director: Richard I. Gibson coordinates interactions among collaborators, oversees project integration, ensures continuous content evaluation, assists Grant Administrator, maintains overall philosophy and approach, interacts with Advisory Board, and is lead author on project-end “white paper” required by grant. Also provides expertise in historical research, photography, and web design to technical teams as needed. Anticipated time commitment: two-thirds to three-quarters time (approx. 1300-1500 hours per year) over the two-year grant term. Mr. Gibson has managed his own world-wide oil industry projects amounting to budgets of as much as $300,000 over 2 years, and comparable projects as an employee of oil companies, as well as dozens of smaller ones over the past 32 years; he was the Education Director at the World Museum of Mining where he developed broad and collaborative projects (2003-05). He serves as a Study Leader for Smithsonian Journeys around the world and as a historical guide in Butte. He has had his own consulting company since 1989.

Computer Technology Manager: Max Detjens will interface with the existing BSB Archives database of information on the properties and its existing connection with BSB GIS-cadastral map data; provides the formatting for the Google Earth interface; supports when necessary html formatting of the work of historians; designs and maintains the web site(s) involved with input from other team members; creates a wiki for internal preparations and review of content for web site(s) and ultimately nationwide input for other NHLs and NHLDs. Mr. Detjens has his own successful software and web development company, and is a partner in a historical restoration and property management company. Time commitment: two-thirds time for each of the two years of the grant period.

Grant Administrator: Josh Yarrington maintains documentation and compliance records, work time, required quarterly reports, etc. Also researches additional funding possibilities for matching and sustainability. Also works with CPR Treasurer to insure proper management of grant funds. The Grant Administrator is anticipated to spend approximately 10% time on this project.

Contract Historians: Cindi Shaw, Irene Scheidecker, and Nicole von Gaza discover, integrate, and synthesize information on and photographs of the properties, including first-person accounts, historical photos, modern photos, architectural data, archival newspaper articles, etc.; write user-friendly summaries of this information and suggest directions for interlinking; and draft outlines for lesson plans incorporating the NHLD history. Although the grant specifically addresses NHLD properties, a few important additional topics will be included for context (e.g., Columbia Gardens, Meaderville and other neighborhoods, Berkeley Pit). Each of the three historians will devote approximately 25-30% time over the two-year grant term. Mary McCormick, Architectural Historian, will serve as a technical advisor and will devote approximately 100 hours per year to the project.

Collaborators: The roles of collaborating organizations are given above. Specific important individuals are Ellen Crain (Director, Butte Archives), Mark Reavis (BSB Historic Preservation Officer), Brian Shovers (Library Manager, MHS), Bill Macgregor (Professor, Montana Tech PTC Dept.), Maire O'Neill (Professor, MSU School of Architecture), Mary McCormick (Architectural Historian, RTI), Rolene Schliesman (SHPO CLG Coordinator), Steve Luft (Montana Tech College of Technology Historic Preservation Program Director). For Ellen Crain, Mark Reavis, and Maire O'Neill our budget allocation amounts to a time commitment of approximately 10-20% over the two years. For the other personnel, the time commitment is approximately 5-10% over the two years.

Advisory Board: The Advisory Board will review monthy reports from the Project Director, quarterly reports from the Grant Administrator, and will have the capacity to review any aspect of the project at any time via the interactive eNHLD Wiki. The board is comprised of the Board of Directors of the Butte CPR (applicant) plus additional members appointed by the CPR Board of Directors.

Members:

• Dr. Larry N. Smith, President; Geologist (Montana Bureau of Mines & Geology) and Historic Preservationist
• Mitzi Rossillon, Treasurer; Industrial Archaeologist, Architectural Historian
• Irene Scheidecker (recused for purposes of this project; historian)
• Dr. Andrea Stierle, Vice President; Biochemist (Montana Tech)
• Carrie Kiely, Archaeologist, Bureau of Land Management
• Robert Edwards, Historic Property Developer
• Josh Yarrington (recused for purposes of this project; grant administrator)

Resumes Needed

Scheidecker, Von Gaza, Reavis, Shovers, Macgregor, O'Neill, Luft