Project Showcase: "Closed for Business"
18 April 2013 – editors
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has launched “Closed for Business,” a new digital history project focused on the early years of the Great Depression and the December 1930 failure of a large Philadelphia bank, Bankers Trust Company.
The project was part of a larger effort funded by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to draw attention to the Society’s 20th-century collections and to build expertise in developing online interpretive projects that follow international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards.
HSP staff selected, digitized, and transcribed 320 documents from one of our flagship 20th-century collections: the Albert M. Greenfield papers. The selected documents include memos about the bank’s operation, letters from depositors desperate to get access to their funds after the bank’s failure, and newspaper clippings about the aftermath of the bank’s failure. The new web resource also includes biographies of some of the people and organizations highlighted in the documents; contextual essays about the history of Bankers Trust Company, the Great Depression in Philadelphia, and the 1930s banking crisis in Philadelphia; and teacher resources.
Thanks in part to the TEI encoding, users can search and access the primary source documents, biographies, and other annotation in multiple ways. For instance, users can view the full list of documents in chronological order, search documents by keyword or date, or filter documents by genre, creator name, or recipient name.
Each primary source document includes a facsimile of the original alongside a transcription of the text. Clicking on the document facsimile opens up a viewer that allows users to zoom in further on the image.
Users can also click on linked text within the transcriptions to learn more about people and organizations mentioned in the documents, as well as see what other documents mention those entities. Some documents also include footnotes, which provide more historical context for readers.
We hope this project will benefit educators and scholars interested in the Great Depression, 20th century Philadelphia, the history of banking in the United States, and other related topics.
~ Sarah Newhouse, Project Assistant, “Closed for Business,” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania