Year: 2014

The book Silent Builder …about Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge is now available in the stacks at TG25. W53 W45 1984.  About 30 pages in the book, written in rather large print, are on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.  A subject search for Roebling brings up several other titles.

The book Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture, TH 845.S33 1980 has a chapter on the Brooklyn Bridge construction that has some illustrations.

A subject search for Othmar Ammann, who designed the George Washington bridge, brings up several books.

A keyword search for Verrazano bridge brings up several titles, but one is in archives, which won’t help the high school students if they need to check a book out.

We have electronic access to a book published by the UN about Ben Van Berkel, a Belgian, who designed the Erasmus Bridge (brug) in Rotterdam. It has helped identify the city in recent years.  The design has been copied the world over.  We also have a book about Santiago Calatrava, another famous architect of bridges.

A possible subject search is  Bridges–New York.

Other possibilities:

The Bridge over the River Kwai, by Pierre Boulle.  PQ 2603.0754 P613 1954.  It is a fictional account of the construction of the Kanchanaburi bridge by POWS and Asian slave laborers during World War II.  (Thousands died constructing the bridge under orders of their Japanese captors; and it was bombed by the Allies.)  The book was made into an award winning film.

A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan.  D763.N4 R9.  Describes the battle in Arnhem, the Netherlands during World War II.  The Allies lost many men trying to capture this bridge and in the battle for Arnhem.

I have a book at home that I can bring in. It is The Bridge at Remagen, a book about the battle for this railroad bridge during World War II.  It was the first intact bridge that the Allies captured in Germany in 1945. This enabled them to move equipment and men over it, before it was bombed.  When I lived in Nebraska it was a very popular book as Karl Timmerman, who led the assault over the bridge, was from West Point,  Nebraska, where I lived. Unfortunately he had died of cancer at an early age There is also a movie about this battle and bridge.

As Randy noted recently, we’re seeing Baruch College Campus High School students working on an assignment about bridges. Here are some book sources to use:

• Run a “keyword in subject” search in the catalog for “bridge” to find books. There will be a lot of ebooks and online government docs in that search, but there will also be print books like:
  • Too big to fall : America’s failing infrastructure and the way forward
  • Bridging deep south rivers : the life and legend of Horace King
  • Bridges : the spans of North America
  • Engineers of dreams : great bridge builders and the spanning of America
  • Bridges of Central Park
  • The Great Bridge
• Browse the architecture books on the 4th floor (call numbers beginning with NA)
• Browse the bridge engineering section on the 5th floor (call numbers beginning with TG 20)
• Look in the The Encyclopedia of New York City for entries on various bridges (available in print and as an ebook)
• Gale Virtual Reference Center
  • A search for bridges yields entries from the Gale Encyclopedia of Science, the Historical Encyclopedia of American Business, West Encyclopedia of American Law, etc.

If anyone else has further ideas about this assignment and sources to recommend, please add them as comments on the original blog post so that chat reference staff at other colleges have access to these suggestions as well. I found some suggestions from last year after searching the archives of the LIBSDL list. If anyone wants to post that info here as a comment, that would be awesome and make the info more accessible to all.