What the HACE?! (Podcast 79)

06/13/17 • 15 min

Preservation Technology Podcast

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What the HACE?! (Episode 79)

Alex Beard on HHACE and how they are preserving American history Alex Beard as she speaks with several architects, conservators, and historians at the Collections Conservation Branch for the Park Service in the Northeast Region known as HACE.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with several architects, conservators, and historians at the Collections Conservation Branch for the Park Service in the Northeast Region known as HACE, in this podcast they will discuss their jobs at HACE and how they are preserving American history.

Alex Beard: Hi this is Alex Beard, I’m in Lowell, Massachusetts at the National Park Service Regional office known as HACE. I’m here with the director of HACE, Stephen Spaulding. Could you tell us what HACE stands for?

Stephen Spaulding: Sure. It stands for Historic Architecture Conservation and Engineering Center. It’s a multi-discipline mixture of staff that have in one form or another been together since probably about the 1970’s. When it started off as the North Atlantic Historic Preservation Center for the North Atlantic Region which is now combined with the Mid-Atlantic and so that’s why it’s the Northeast Region.

Alex Beard: And where is HACE located?

Stephen Spaulding: Our main office is in Lowell, and that’s where we have our conservation labs, and paint lab, and mortar lab and the sort. But we also have offices in Philadelphia and New York City and Hampton, Virginia, Auburn, NY, Hyde Park, NY.

Alex Beard: And for those of you who don’t know, Lowell, Massachusetts is about 30 minutes north or so of the city of Boston. And why Lowell, Massachusetts?

Stephen Spaulding: We started off we were in Charlestown Navy yard down in a great building on the pier right next to the Constitution Museum and the workshop for the Constitution that the Navy ran and in about 1986 or so congressman Tip O’Neill got us a million dollars to move out, because they wanted our building for the Constitution Museum. And so we were actually able to become part of the development project for Boott Mills and ended up with, at that point, state-of-the-art conservation labs because of that funding.

Alex Beard: Who does HACE serve?

HACE conservation lab photo documentation set-up.

Stephen Spaulding: We primarily serve the Northeast Region and probably 80% of our work load is for the small and medium sized parts. They’re the parts that really do not have the necessary technical expertise to undertake certain specialized work so we have historic architects, architectural conservators, historians, engineers, landscape architects and preservation crews. And those are the type of disciplines it’s very hard for small and medium-sized parks to keep on staff.

Alex Beard: Can someone outside the Parks Service every contact HACE for work or opinions?

Stephen Spaulding: Opinions fine, that’s pretty much how the profession works all the way across the board is you’re always reaching out to people that have expertise in some areas that you might not have yourself as far as our providing services to outside organizations, we do that with parks in other regions and sometimes we also work for organizations outside of the Parks Service but we have to be able to justify that it’s in the service of a nationally significant resource or something that has an association to a park service theme.

Alex Beard: What are some of the larger, more important parks in the Northeast Region for HACE?

Stephen Spaulding: There’s emphasis’ that occur at certain times on park resources, so for example, the final anniversary for the Civil War was the surrender at Appomattox and we basically spent five years there going through all the parks historic structures with preservation crews, contracts, working with other parks service organizations like Historic Preservation Training Center. Trying to get all the buildings into appropriate condition for the anniversary, but now we won’t be there for a while and so we’re working at other parks. Some of them that are new, some which just have a large work load backlog of preservation, reevaluation or architectural study needs.

Alex Beard: Could you shed a little bit more light on HACE and what the branches are?

Stephen Spaulding: Sure, we’re made up of four branches: Construction, Conservation, and Training which is primarily the preservation crews and hands on architectural conservators, Design and Preservation Planning which is the architects and engineers and landscape architects and the Historic Structures, Research, and Documentation Branch which oversees the li...

Next Episode

Rapid Digital Documentation of Endangered Cultural Sites: CyArk (Episode 80)

Jason Church speaks with Kacey Hadick, Heritage and Conservation Program Manager at CyArk. In this podcast they talk about CyArkâ€,s Digital Documentation Kits for rapid documentation of endangered cultural sites.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Training Syrian heritage professionals with photogrammetry software.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kacey Hadick, Heritage and Conservation Program Manager at CyArk. In this podcast they talk about CyArk’s Digital Documentation Kits for rapid documentation of endangered cultural sites.

Jason Church: Today I’m here at the Old Mint Museum in New Orleans, talking with Kacey Hadick the Manager of Heritage and Conservation Products with CyArk. So Kacey, tell us a little bit about who CyArk is?

Kacey Hadick: So CyArk is a 501C nonprofit based in Oakland, California. And our mission is to archive and share the world’s cultural heritage. So we’ve been around since 2003, documenting over 200 sites on all seven continents. I’m here talking about a kit that we created through a grant from NCPTT, how to rapidly document cultural heritage sites using photogrammetry.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about the kit? Why was it developed?

Kacey Hadick: Right now, as many people know, the Middle East is experiencing heritage loss, whether it’s in Iraq or Yemen or Syria. And so recognizing this need in these areas, it’s kind of difficult to use a laser scanner, which is one of CyArk’s traditional technologies. We wanted to create a kit that could be easily deployed and sent to these areas so locals on the ground could document their heritage using photogrammetry.

Jason Church: Now these locals on the ground, have they already been trained, or do they have knowledge of this, or is this something new for them?

Kacey Hadick: So we’ve deployed three kits, the kit that’s currently being utilized in the Middle East was given to the UNESCO offices in Beirut, Lebanon. And in Lebanon we had teams from Lebanon as well as teams from Syria come and receive training on how to complete photogrammetry of heritage sites, so they do have some training.

Jason Church: So tell us a little bit, what is in this kit? What do they get?

CyArk’s Rapid Digital Documentation Field Kit.

Kacey Hadick: The heritage documentation kit includes a digital camera, laser distance meter, a table computer, a GPS receiver and a compact tripod, as well as video tutorials, actually printed materials on best practices for how to document a heritage site. The kit is in English, the groups that we work with had some working knowledge of English, but it could be easily translated into Arabic or the language of the region. All of the materials that are within the kit are posted publicly online on the cyark.org website and you can select a checkbox and it will actually fill up your Amazon cart with all of the items within the kit. So the idea is that the materials in the kit, there’s nothing special that you have to special order, anything, this is all equipment that anyone can purchase and most people have some familiarity with digital cameras so that they can just begin documenting.

Jason Church: Once a kit’s been deployed, a team’s been trained, and they’ve gone out and they do the documentation, where does that documentation go?

Kacey Hadick: These are heritage organizations that we have deployed the kit to. And so it’s going back to their main offices where they can process the data. But there’s also an aspect where they store all of the data that they capture in the cloud and so associated with each kit is a Dropbox account so that the participants can upload their files that way, so that if the site is damaged and maybe their digital copies are lost, there’s still a copy in the cloud that’s safe.

Jason Church: And what if they don’t have access to wireless or the cloud?

Kacey Hadick: They can move it to a different country. So in Syria, the internet is slow or spotty at times, and so what the participants have done is they’ve shipped actual hard drives containing the data that they captured to adjacent countries, in this case Lebanon, where we have a relationship with the UNESCO offices. And so in Lebanon at the UNESCO office, they upload the data to the cloud for us. The kit is currently being used in Damascus, Syria and in Aleppo. These are two regions that have experienced heavy fighting and both of the sites are UNESCO World Heritage properties and the UNESCO listing covers the whole entire old city, so there’s lots of historic buildings, from the 15th, 14th centuries. And so they’re documenting these structu...