Posts Tagged by brian wilson
Lillian Schwartz Collection: Beginning the Journey
In 2021, The Henry Ford acquired the papers of noted computer-generated film and new media artist Lillian F. Schwartz as part of the larger Lillian F. Schwartz & Laurens R. Schwartz Collection.
The papers, perhaps the most complex set of materials ever brought into the holdings of the archives and library at The Henry Ford, contain multiple formats, including documents, graphics, audio, still and moving images, and books in both physical and digital forms.
In addition to the archival and library materials, the larger collection includes many three-dimensional items, such as sculpture, clothing, and large framed artworks, with our collections management and registrar staff being responsible for the care of those items.
The collection’s journey to the archives and library began by receiving the shipment into a large project area in Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, and then unwrapping and unloading pallets.
Photo by Brian Wilson
Photo by Brian Wilson
Boxes were sorted so that we could check them against existing inventory lists and create additional inventories if needed. Any unlabeled boxes were given temporary paper labels so that they could be tracked.
As the inventories were reviewed, determinations were made about where materials would be stored in the Benson Ford Research Center (BFRC). Storage locations were specified based on the format of the material with, for example, film being placed in cold storage, and books being transferred to library storage.
Once we understood how much we had and where we wanted to put it, we began making shelf space in the BFRC. Many existing collections had to be relocated to create room, with location data for each of those collections requiring updates in our collections management system. In several cases, moving a collection required moving one, two, or three other collections to make efficient use of available shelving. In the end, we made 95 shelves and 16 flat file drawers available for the Schwartz papers. With each shelf being 40 inches wide, this added up to over a football field in length of shelving!
Photo by Brian Wilson
Photo by Brian Wilson
The newly cleared shelves and drawers were slowly filled with boxes and folders over several weeks as the materials were moved from the museum to the BFRC.
Photo by Brian Wilson
Photo by Brian Wilson
In addition to storing the physical materials, we’ve also been reviewing the electronic data included in the papers. Located on multiple “carriers,” including computers, external hard drives, and backup disks, the data includes thousands of text, image, and video files. We’re noting the type, storage size, manufacturer, and part and serial number for each carrier and have created disk images of the most recently used hard drive to improve access to and preserve that data.
Our next steps in this journey will be to expand and refine the original inventories by reviewing the entire collection in the BFRC box-by-box, folder-by-folder, and hard-drive-by-hard-drive with the goal of creating a single master inventory. This inventory will become the starting point for access to the papers for our staff and researchers.
Be sure to visit our Digital Collections to see items from the entire collection that have already been digitized, and contact the archives and library at research.center@thehenryford.org if you’d like more information on this collection—or any of the hundreds of others in our holdings.
Brian Wilson is Senior Manager of Library and Archives at The Henry Ford.
2020s, 21st century, women's history, technology, Michigan, drawings, Dearborn, computers, collections care, by Brian Wilson, art, archives, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford
Exterior View, Ford Highland Park Plant, 30 March 1932; Object P.833.56894.1 / THF237509
When Ford Motor Company engineers developed the assembly line at the Highland Park Plant back in 1913, they were seeking to increase production volume in order to provide more automobiles to the general public at a reasonable cost, and in a reasonable time.
Move ahead more than 100 years to 2020, where the staff of The Henry Ford and the Benson Ford Research Center (BFRC) are operating a modern assembly line to digitize images and documents from our collections and make them available online.
By some estimates, The Henry Ford holds roughly 26 million 2D and 3D objects, with the majority of that total – some 25 million items – contained within the archival collections at the BFRC. Clearly, there’s a lot to move down our “assembly line”!
As is the case with auto assembly, there are a number of stations along our line, beginning with material selection, then material retrieval, cataloging, imaging, storage, import, export, and finally ending with online display. Improvements made to the speed and efficiency at each of these stations can lead to gains in the production rate of the entire line.
This graphic shows where Rapid Capture imaging fits into The Henry Ford's overall digitization process.
To bring that speed and efficiency to archival imaging, the BFRC uses a process we refer to as Rapid Capture digitization. Developed by several institutions as an approach to increasing the scale of digitization, Rapid Capture is part technology, part process, and part philosophy.
Technically, Rapid Capture is rather simple. The equipment consists of a copy stand, lighting, a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera, and a computer equipped with photo editing software.
Rapid Capture station.
The important feature of the camera is its full-frame sensor, which can create a 400-pixel-per-inch image of an item as large as 9 × 14 inches, allowing us to provide users with high-quality images for the majority of our archival materials, which can be easily viewed, downloaded, and used for presentations or reports.
At the click of the shutter button, the camera can record an entire image – perhaps an 8 × 10 photographic print – without the cycle time of a more traditional flatbed scanner. If you’ve used a digital camera or a camera phone to take personal photographs, then you know how quickly you can take tens or even hundreds of snapshots. The same holds true for Rapid Capture, with the limit on imaging rate being the safe and proper handling of the archival material, not the time spent waiting for the scanner to make a pass.
On certain projects, we are able to capture both sides of a photographic print in less than 60 seconds, translating to nearly 500 prints imaged in a single day. Our flatbed scanner can produce 10-12 images per hour, or both sides of just 48 prints per day. Starting with a single Rapid Capture workstation in February 2011 and now utilizing two workstations, we have produced nearly 100,000 production images since the launching the process.
Process, or efficiency in process, is also an important part of Rapid Capture. For example, since material handling is one of the keys to the speed of Rapid Capture, we work to select and schedule material in groups having similar sizes or formats and that are located together physically, such as the box of 8 × 10 photographic prints shown below.
8 x 10 photographs from our collection foldered within an archival box.
Another example occurs in the post-processing of images, which can also be done in a batch manner, including exposure correction, cropping, and derivative image creation. By using automated scripts, much of this work can be done unattended, and in the case of large batches, performed in the overnight hours.
Finally, Rapid Capture is in some ways a philosophy. Rapid Capture puts a premium on user access to large numbers of images, and in doing so forces trade-offs in areas such as perceived image quality and image resolution. An example of this trade-off can be seen in some of our Rapid Capture images, which appear slightly tilted, such as this image from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection.
Railway Station at Haines Corners, Catskill Mountains, New York, circa 1902; Object P.DPC.014510 / THF204908
Rather than spend additional time on each image to create a perfect alignment, we’ve chosen to spend that additional time producing more images, with the assumption that you, our users, would want to see more “stuff,” and can accept some imperfection.
A second compromise involves image resolution. While the camera can produce images sufficient for online viewing and use in presentations, the images may not be adequate for advertising or commercial publication. We’ve accepted that a certain number of items may need to be reimaged at some point for publication use, but that the potential rescanning effort is outweighed by the ability to both produce and store more lower-resolution images.
Our implementation of Rapid Capture has proven to be very successful. In nearly 10 years of operation, we’ve created a large number of images that meet our goals for quality, usefulness, production time, and cost. And, as we celebrate our #digitization100K milestone of 100,000 digitized objects on our Digital Collections, we can also point to the more than 38,500 objects that are illustrated using Rapid Capture images as another measure of that success.
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digital collections, by Brian Wilson, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, #digitization100K, digitization, archives, photography, technology
It's usually a safe bet that when someone asks us, "Do you have FILL IN THE BLANK in the collections at The Henry Ford?" odds are pretty good that we do. Today is #NationalSpaceDay and, as you guessed it, we've got space-related artifacts in our collections to share. Digital Access & Preservation Archivist Brian Wilson took a look in our archives and found these designs from Sundberg-Ferar. Take a look. - Lish Dorset is Social Media Manager at The Henry Ford.
In the early 1980s, Detroit-area industrial design firm Sundberg-Ferar, Inc. worked with the Lockheed Corporation and NASA to develop concepts for a manned space station.
Through a series of drawings, including those shown here, Sundberg-Ferar illustrated what life in space could be like for astronauts aboard the station.
The designers considered how the astronauts would perform normal earthbound tasks in the tight quarters of the space station, including the need to exercise, bathe and sleep, and how a near-zero gravity environment would affect those tasks. For example, the shower design features a retractable toe restraint in the floor, while the treadmill uses a waist belt to keep the user in place.
In addition to the space station renderings, our collection of Sundberg-Ferar material includes their work on designs for a variety of other transportation and travel vehicles dating from the 1960s-1980s, including supersonic transport and large passenger jet planes, commuter trains, and rapid transit rail cars used in San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Atlanta.
Brian Wilson is Digital Access & Preservation Archivist at The Henry Ford.
by Brian Wilson, by Lish Dorset, space, drawings, design, archives
Earlier this week we shared another set of items that were recently digitized for our online collections: football artifacts to supplement our latest traveling exhibit, Gridiron Glory: The Best of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One of those items is Edsel Ford’s 1934 season pass to home games of the Detroit Lions, which is actually on display inside the exhibit. In the picture of the pass you'll see that "Cancelled" is written in one of the top corners. After we shared the photo on Twitter yesterday Dave Birkett sent us this Tweet:
Anyone have any idea why "cancelled" would be written on that pass? @thehenryford
— Dave Birkett (@davebirkett) October 1, 2014
The explanation wasn't included in the online narrative for the pass and actually had several of us scratching our own heads - why was the pass cancelled? Thanks to Brian Wilson, Digital Processing Archivist at The Henry Ford, we found the answer. Here's Brian's report as he took a trip to our archives. - Lish Dorset Social Media Manager, The Henry Ford. Continue Reading
20th century, 1930s, sports, research, Michigan, Ford family, football, Edsel Ford, Detroit, by Lish Dorset, by Brian Wilson
