Finding Pictures: Celebrating 90 Years of the Historic American Buildings Survey

Special guest, Catherine Lavoie, Chief of the Historic American Buildings Survey in the Heritage Documentation Programs office of the National Park Service will join us to discuss the vital role played by Library of Congress curator Leicester B. Holland, and the well-loved collection that makes it accessible to all.

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS, est. 1933) is the nation’s first federal preservation program to document America’s architectural heritage. This effort, later joined by the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER, est. 1969) and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS, est. 2000), is administered through the National Park Service.

The series in combination have recorded America’s built environment in multiformat surveys comprising drawings, photographs, and written histories for more than 44,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century.