CLIR-Funded Employee Card project is Complete!

A long-awaited data creation project is now complete and available for researchers and the public. About 39,000 archival employee records from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company collection in the Michigan Tech Archives have been digitized and incorporated into two online research platforms:

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Copper Miners Employee Cards Database (CMEC)
This brand new research platform at the Michigan Tech Archives lets you keyword search and see high-resolution scans of individual employee cards. Check it out here https://miners.mtu.edu.

The cards featured in this database were filled out by C&H company clerks whenever someone applied for work. They record the person's place of birth, family members' names, and current residence as well as all the jobs they held while employed by the company. These cards offer a wealth of information unavailable in other kinds of archival or municipal records.

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The Keweenaw Time Traveler’s Explore App now includes data about individual C&H employees connected to historic maps and other archival data. Access it at www.KeweenawHistory.com.

Along with an individual's information recorded in the US census and city directories, now any information from their related C&H employee card is also available in the Explore App. Look for new kinds of information tagged "C&H," especially under the Employment heading. 

CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE INVOLVED!

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This project has been a major three-year endeavor for a team of researchers in the Michigan Tech Archives, the Geospatial Research Facility, and the Department of Social Sciences. Project leads Sarah F. Scarlett (Social Sciences), Don Lafreniere (Social Sciences and Geospatial Research Facility), and Lindsay Hiltunen (University Archivist) received a grant for $240,012 in January 2020 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a DC-based non-profit whose “Digitizing Hidden Collections” program is made possible with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

We brought together a collaborative team across University units with several interrelated and ambitious goals:

1. To scan, digitize, and make publicly accessible one of the Michigan Tech Archives’ most referenced collections: a group of 38,951 employee cards kept by the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company;
2. To transcribe the cards to create a historical dataset of names and details about the lives, families, and work histories of people who came from all over the world to work at C&H;
3. To integrate that data set into the backend of the Keweenaw Time Traveler so that each employee could be mapped to their home, and connected with other records including the US census, city directories, and school records already available.  

After three years, a one-year no-cost extension, countless hours of patient scanning, painstaking transcription, geocoding, record linking, debate about user interface design — all during a global pandemic! — this team is very pleased to announce the successful completion of the Michigan Miners at Home and Work Project! 

Over the next weeks and months, more Project News stories will appear with in-depth reflections from some of the over 25 student workers who were the heart of this project. Each of these students learned to read cursive (something new to many of them!) and dedicated themselves to deciphering and making sense of the abbreviations used by C&H clerks. They got together on Zoom to share their experiences and lend mutual support during the isolation caused by COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021. Thanks to all of them!  

Thanks to all the students who worked on this project:
Brooke Batterson
Julian Blann
Chris Charteris
Julianna Cummings
Becky Daniels
J. Zach Dill (Lunch Time Chat Video with Zach!)
Adi Hanany
Charlotte Hildebrandt
Nicholas Hundt
Ben Imig
Nev Indish 
Melina Lopez
Jacob Maxon
Michelle Perini
Ashton Powell
Grayson Reyes
Lynn Roberts
Ellie Sackrider
Cheyenne Scott
Anna-Marie Seitter
Ezekiel Stark
Chris Trevino
Cas Tuson (Student Spotlight Video with Cas!)
Dalton Vas Binder
Kevin White (Read Kevin's Blog Post!)
​Tyler Zetty

Thanks to the Michigan Tech staff who worked directly on this project:

Geospatial Research Facility:
Ryan Williams
Dan Trepal
Bob Cowling

Michigan Tech Library:
David Holden
Chris Chosa
Emily Riipa Schwiebert

Look for more reports and reflections about the completion of this project in the coming weeks. In the meantime, explore the C&H employee card data in CMEC and KeTT! 

This project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (https://www.clir.org/) (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.