The Bancroft Library, the official repository of PPIE records, worked with Historypin leading up to the event to map hundreds of images from its collections depicting all aspects of the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco. Event participants, many UC Berkeley students and faculty, worked together on laptops and used resources such as printed grounds maps provided by the Bancroft as well as online exhibit directories digitized from Bancroft’s collections. Some groups explored the uploaded images on Historypin and helped to edit associated location and description information on the live site, while others worked with the raw metadata from the Jesse Brown Cook collection to attribute locations (in the form of coordinates) and dates to the collection’s images. Images uploaded to Historypin (as well as video and audio), must contain locations and dates in order to appear publicly on the website’s map.

The event kicked off with a tour of the Bancroft Library’s PPIE exhibit by Curator Theresa Salazar, followed by a reception and talk by Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and Jon Voss on Historypin’s own strategies for mapping thousands of PPIE photos for this centennial celebration year. The Bancroft also displayed a handful of original PPIE artifacts from its collections in Morrison for participants to browse, completing a fun night of time-travel back to 1915.

You can explore the mapped Bancroft images participants were working on here.