Introduction

During the initial planning stages of Historic Pittsburgh, members of the project team envisioned the development of a chronology or timeline to accompany the web site. A chronology would provide an overview of the rich history of Pittsburgh and assist users in their effort to contextualize the city's broad social, political, and economic climate in their research.

Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City

The renowned photojournalism pioneer and author, Stefan Lorant, wrote perhaps one of the best-known books about the history of Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City, Lorant includes as an appendix an exhaustive chronology of Pittsburgh, dating from 1717 and continuing to July 1999 (fifth edition). Over 3,000 events from Pittsburgh’s past are chronicled in this timeline.

DRL Partners with Publishing Group

The DRL negotiated with Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (RLPG) for the rights to reproduce the chronology in electronic form. As part of the agreement, the DRL is collaborating with the Library & Archives of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania at the History Center to update the chronology over a five-year period. Every year the staff of the History Center cull through microfilm reels of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh covering the past year, recording dates and events of significance.

Building the Electronic Version

The DRL captured the 84 pages of text by scanning and employing optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Next, this information was entered into a database, creating fields for the year, month, date, and event. During a proofing stage, the DRL corrected OCR problems so that entries would accurately reflect the text found in the printed source. The DRL added the new entries provided by the History Center to the database.

The chronology data was transferred to a MySQL database for online searching and presentation. A CGI script takes queries from the search forms, queries the database, and returns results formatted in HTML.

Browsing and Searching the Chronology

In thinking about how to build the online version of the chronology, the DRL wanted to keep the best features of print chronologies while adding the value of the powerful searching and grouping tools possible with an electronic database. To achieve these goals, the DRL decided to build a system that would permit both browsing and searching, and to allow easy movement between the two kinds of views. Because searching necessarily pulls events out of their chronological context, the DRL built in functionality that makes it easy to see what other events happened in any particular year included in the search results.

Since every calendar date is represented in the online chronology, the DRL included a dynamically-generated "On This Day in Pittsburgh History" feature on the chronology homepage.

For additional information about the Chronology project, see "A Look Back in Time: The Historic Pittsburgh Online Chronology", which appeared in the January 2002 issue of the ULS Digital Library News.

Contact Us with feedback and questions.
Historic Pittsburgh is hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library.