CIPA 2003 XIX th International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
As information providers, we were to do the following 
activities: 
Heritage Recording—capturing information relevant 
to understanding the physical configuration, evolution 
and condition of the Canal’s site and structures at an 
exact period of time -1904-1914-. 
Documentation—the production of new information 
units, drawings, photographs and written report, that 
would constitute new interpretive knowledge of this 
particular site and structure. 
Information management—the process of acquiring, 
storing, and sharing the site’s documentation to ensure 
its accessibility, security and reliability through a 
database. 
Conservation—through new documentation we would 
globally transmit a cultural heritage with its significant 
messages intact to the greatest degree possible. 
A personnel strategy was formed at the Washington 
office and, through the US/ICOMOS Summer Intern 
Program, Panamanians were to come and make part of 
the team. The operation's plan of a project to record a 
resource as vast as the Panama Canal required an 
international approach. 
Documentation procedures were to follow the 
National Park Service Secretary of the Interior’s 
Standards, necessary with both Panamanians and 
North American personnel working together at 
different sites. Final bilingual drawings would be 
housed at the Library of Congress of the USA and in 
the Republic of Panama, supported by the agreement 
for sharing of information and the exchange of 
expertise and training. Interpretive drawings; large- 
format photographs; field records, and a database will 
be the final deliverables of the project. 
Operation 
The Panama Canal documentation Project started on 
June 2002 through the internship summer program, 
hiring a young architect from Panama for producing 
CAD drawings of the Pedro Miguel Locks in the 
Washington office and a USA student to work in 
Panama on the Administration Building. Besides these 
two young professionals, the project included two 
architectural students; a Colombian architect who 
worked on the database and a Vietnamese/American to 
do the hand-drawn sheets. Before beginning the 
summer program, large-format photography took 
place in July 2001, photographically documenting the 
twenty-first century technological changes. 
Getting started in Washington, access to virtual 
drawings was our immediate choice, because of the 
distance, size and complexity of the Canal. Although 
the approach was to use digital data, several visits to 
the site were required in order to develop the 
familiarity needed for recording this complex 
structure, which besides encouraging an active 
engagement, it would build a unique liaison between 
the surveyor and the construction. The act of gathering 
data, organizing it and translating it into 3D drawings, 
required intellectual, emotional and interpretive skills 
that were distributed well. Each one of the team 
members established a relationship to the others within 
their goal and I am proud to present to you what has 
been achieved. 
At the beginning of the project, the situation with the 
existing-engineering drawings was the following: 
Back in 1994, the Records Management Branch of the 
Panama Canal Commission (PCC) requested an on 
site scheduling assistance from the National Archives 
and Records Administration (NARA) regarding the 
architectural and engineering drawings accumulated at 
the PCC’s Engineering and Construction Bureau in 
Panama. Permanent disposition of the entire collection 
was scheduled to take place immediately after 
microfilming. A hard copy was to be left with the 
Panamanian administration. But in 1997 a new 
agreement took place and instead of transferring the 
original drawings to the United States, a microfilm 
hardcopy was accepted. 
The entire collection, dating from 1899 to the present, 
was grouped by a numbered series running from 1 to 
70 according to dates and kept entirely in Panama 
under the custody of the Central Archives Office of 
the Authority of the Panama Canal (ACP) in the 
drawing vault of the Engineering Division at Diablo 
Heights. Today new headquarters are being restored at 
Corozal Oeste, where the entire collection will be 
housed under very good conservation conditions. 
A visit on May 2001 to the office of Information 
Technology of the Engineering Division at APC 
informed us about a digital project that took place by 
direct order of the Department of Defense, from June 
1998 through December 1999, when the drawings 
were scanned and an Access database was provide for 
its retrieval. In accordance with the agreement, the 
scanned images were subsequently to be transposed to 
a computer-output microfilm and be sent to NARA. 
NARA received one silver halide and one diazo copy 
in October 2001. 
In 1995, the Environmental Resources Planning 
Section and the Planning and Environmental Division 
of the Mobile District Corps of Engineers for the 
Panama Canal Treaty Agency conducted a baseline 
historic resource assessment of the historic lands and 
facilities located within the Panama Canal Zone. Prior 
to the survey, a team was sent to gather the archival 
records and transferred them successfully to NARA. 
Having identified and located the documents-the 
architectural and the engineering drawings, the textual 
records, the photographic albums-of the former 
Panama Canal Zone at the National Archives and 
Library of Congress in the United States, and in the