Documenting Historic Buildings

5-week course
This five-session workshop will review and illustrate successful strategies for gleaning information from a variety of sources including traditional paper-based documents, as well as multiple digital resources. Participants will learn to glean building information from public documents such as deeds, newspapers, wills, building permits, historical surveys, and local, state, and federal historic registrations.  Also included will be instruction on discovering and making use of private records, such as family papers, photographic collections, maps, architectural drawings, and historic structure reports.  The course will feature site-visits to local repositories, including the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

Instructor: Bruce Laverty
Dates: Saturdays, Jan. 20-Feb. 17
Time: 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Location: various locations
Credits: 1 CEUs; 10 AIA LU credits

Bruce Laverty has been Director of the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project, a free, on-line database of architectural information and images consulted more than 150,000 times daily, since 2000. He also serves as Project Director of the Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network, a Mellon Foundation-sponsored project that has digitized and web-mounted more than 7000 historic map and survey images. He also is an adjunct faculty member at Drexel University, where he teaches History of Philadelphia Architecture and Intro to Historic Preservation.