On April 15, 2015, a post-award meeting was conducted for the Principle Investigators, sponsored projects post-award representatives, and the fiscal representative. This meeting was held to review the project responsibilities, time line, and paperwork needed to set up the budget.

Maps were transported to the Conservation Center for Art and Historical Artifacts for high-quality scanning.  When the digitized images were returned to us, it was determined that we needed them to be divided up into smaller swaths than we had anticipated to facilitate our addition of content to the maps.

While the digitization was occurring, research conducted by research assistants over the summer led to the identification and gathering of appropriate content and archival materials into a database that is being utilized by students in Dr. Shprintzen's HIST 401 (Labor and Industrialization in America) course at Marywood University  to geo-tag a map of the region during the Fall semester. As the project continues, students are affiliating the items in the database with the maps, and will have the map filled with the first 90 points by November 5th, and will complete their involvement in the project by December 2nd, with a total of 180 individual points added to the map.

The funded component of this project, creation of the map and the work to create a historically-rich GIS map layer, provides students both with deeper understanding of history, and experience in building the digital technologies provides the backbone and proof of concept for additional layers.

This activity supports the goal of creating a digital image of the northern anthracite coal field map. The map was scanned into map sections. Map A will be digitized from 3 scans; Map B will be digitized from 4 scans. The scans will be color corrected and stitched and the files optimized. The final map image, which willbe the same size as the original, will be burnt to DVD. The second activity will be to geo-reference the digital map image. As a result of this project, a high-resolution scan of one historically significant map of the northern anthracite coal field from the 2nd PA Geological survey (1883-1889) will begeo-referenced, interpreted using supplemental images and primary source documents, and housed in a regional digital archive publicly accessible via the Internet. Additionally, a college-level Industrial History course will haveaccess to utilize this geo-referenced map for historical reference.