Scott Lewis wears so many hats at ENR it can be hard to keep track of them. As ENR’s editorial research director, he is effectively ENR’s archivist, digging up past coverage for other editors and responding to queries from ENR readers seeking all sorts of industry information and data. In essence, he is ENR’s historian, and this holiday season his enthusiasm is peaking for a remarkable digital archive of ENR’s content from the publication’s founding in 1874 through 1922. The ENR collection is contained in the HathiTrust archive, a large-scale collaborative digital repository from research libraries. Its content was digitized via the Google Books project and the Internet Archive digitization initiative as well as by individual libraries. The ENR collection stops in 1922, after which copyright applies. Material prior to that year is free for anyone to access.
“What you’ll notice first is that ENR was quite different back then,” says Lewis. “Every issue contained several lengthy articles about significant projects written by their chief engineers. And the magazine devoted more coverage to the topic of public health, as water and wastewater treatment were still-developing fields.”