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
