The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) is one of the oldest federal programs in the United States. In 1933, the HABS culture of documentation started with the mission of creating a permanent record of the nation's architectural heritage. Since the inception of the program, the formal documentation methodology has been measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories. HABS documentation accentuates the act of drawing as a mediating conversation between the documenter and the historic environment. In a typical HABS project, the documenter is immersed in the historic setting by hand measuring the structure and creating field notes. The documenter's intimate access to the artifact develops his awareness of cultural heritage and helps cultivate an appreciation for the compositional sensibilities of the architectural precedents. However, the HABS culture of documentation has been fine-tuned to incorporate a number of digital technologies into documentation projects. When projects involve issues of logistics, time, and cost, HABS professionals utilize a host of digital methodologies to produce measured drawings. Although HABS prepares deliverables to meet the archival standards of the Library of Congress, the hardware and software necessary to recognize digital files have a limited lifespan that makes them unacceptable for use in the Library. Only measured drawings that use archival ink on stable translucent material, accompanied by negatives on safety film, can be submitted to the Library. Thus, if HABS pursued only digital technologies and deliverables, the effects of this approach on the quality of the documenter's engagement with cultural heritage would pose a significant question. This study addressed the question of how the HABS culture of documentation evolved in regards to drawing and technology, and how this relationship might be transformed in the future. Using HABS as a focus of inquiry is important in order to illuminate similar dynamics in heritage projects that utilize digital technologies. The methodology used in this study included a literature review, participant observations, and an analysis of documentation projects, as well as in-depth interviews with HABS staff, project participants, private practitioners, and academicians. The outcome of the study will be recommendations to heritage professionals for a future that resides in digital means without compromising the qualities that the HABS experience has offered to generation of documenters.

In order to prepare for the prospective need for heritage 3D recording, the main objective of this research was to investigate a new depth measuring method that can reduce identified limitations of current point-to-point measuring approaches. The limitations were time-money consumption, intrusiveness, accuracy assumption and efficiency. In many disciplines other than heritage recording, optical moir?? interferometry techniques (OMIT) are well developed as a measuring method and are considered fast, non-intrusive, accurate, and efficient. Based on these considerations, this research hypothesized that OMIT, as a measuring method, is feasible with respect to time-consumption and accuracy in acquiring depth measurement for fine-grain surface relief for historic recording. To test this hypothesis, a feasibility investigation was carried in which OMIT was used for surface relief topographic recording. This goal was approached by performing a comparison study between the OMIT measuring method as the investigated method and the hand measuring method as the control method. For each method, the comparison required performing eight experimental samplings of relief recording for a pre-designed physical model surface. The data collected from the hand measuring samples were the depth measurements of predefined points on the model surface and the timeconsumption for both measuring and data preparing processes. The data collected from the OMIT measuring samples were moir?? dark fringes generated on the model surface and the time-consumption for both moir?? generating and data preparing processes. For measurement accuracy evaluation, the collected depth data were prepared in the form of topographic contour drawings. For the OMIT feasibility evaluation, a comparison was carried out to examine the resulting topographic contour drawings for depth measurement accuracy level and measuring process time-consumption. In conclusion, the OMIT method showed higher depth measurement accuracy levels and lower process time-consumption than the hand method. The OMIT method also demonstrated less intrusiveness and more efficiency. This superiority validates the feasibility of using fine-grain surface relief for heritage recording purposes. Finally, the observed advantages of the OMIT method were presented to establish potentials for future developments and investigations. The observed limitations of the method were also pointed out to establish trends for recommendations and further studies.