In June 2009 the Fire Safety Engineering group from The University of
Edinburgh begun the challenge of scanning more than 40,000 documents previously
located in the BRE Fire Research Archive at the BRE headquarters in Watford. The
BRE Fire Research Archive contained documents published during the early and
mid-20th century, in almost every topic related to Fire Science, opinion
sheared by the few ones that have gone through some of the tens of thousands of
documents. A previous
description of this project was blogged at an earlier stage.
For the last two years the Fire Safety Engineering group has developed
a, postgraduate student-led, self-funded, project to scan these documents, making
them available online for the entire fire community at the Digital Preservation of the
FRS/BRE Fire Research Archives open access collection from the Edinburgh Research Archive.
To date, the progress of this project has only been possible thanks to
the time and resources selflessly given by Kate Anderson, Susan Deeny, Guillermo Rein,
Ania Grupka, Tao Gao, Natalia Mambrilla, John Gales, Agustin Majdalani,
Marcin Gorączniak, Sarah Higginson, Iris Chang, Frances Radford, Aleksandra
Danielewicz and others members of the Fire Safety Engineering group (undergraduate,
postgraduates, staff members and visitors), which have participated in some way
or another. The support of Theo
Andrew, co-developer of the open access and open source Edinburgh Research Archive, has been
also been of immense help.
Some time ago, John Gales, PhD
student from the Fire Safety Engineering group, come across a file containing World
War II fire safety propaganda posters design and printed by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in
Boston, Massachusetts, between 1942 and 1944. The single act of finding the posters
was a gift on John’s behave, to the entire fire community, which would have
otherwise be lost with time. The posters went through a high quality scanning
process and then uploaded into the
open access collection. The rareness of the posters found by John was
something unique, and like this, many other documents have been found and
uploaded into the online collection.
The project is now expanding fast and the Digital Preservation of the
FRS/BRE Fire Research Archives online open access collection has now 291
documents, which is expected to reach 500 during the first semester of 2012,
being this just the tip of the iceberg of what can be achieved.
Thanks to Guillermo for being the driving force and common denominator
throughout the project.
1 comment:
I've got a funny feeling that the one's making this propaganda are also the one who will most likely to start the fire. haha
Fire Alarm
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