Posts Tagged digital collections
You may be familiar with the many clocks featured in the Clockwork exhibit in Henry Ford Museum. However, The Henry Ford also has hundreds of clocks in storage, and scores more displayed in different places on the Museum floor and in Greenfield Village. We’ve just digitized about 20 timepieces, including this mid-19th century example, which can be seen in Smiths Creek Depot. View more than 60 clocks and other related objects on our digital collection site.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections and Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
In the last third of the 19th century, an unprecedented variety of consumer goods and services flooded the American market. Advertisers, armed with new methods of color printing, bombarded potential customers with trade cards. Americans enjoyed and often saved the vibrant little advertisements. We’ve just finished digitizing over 800 trade cards from The Henry Ford’s collection, including this example promoting a theatrical event. Visit our collections site to read the back, which promises “a Gorgeous Pagent [sic], Bewildering to the Mind and Dazzling to the Senses.”
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford. Thanks to this week's co-author, Saige Jedele, Associate Curator at The Henry Ford.
digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, by Saige Jedele, advertising
Over time, people have marked the deaths of their loved ones in many ways. One popular method in the 18th and 19th centuries was the wearing of mourning jewelry, which often incorporated the hair of the deceased. We’ve just added close to 50 more stunning examples of mourning jewelry and other memorial items to our digital collections, including the mourning brooch depicted here, a ring dating to 1716, and a doll’s coffin.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections and Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
19th century, 18th century, jewelry, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
50-year-old canned mushrooms? You might be inclined to pass if someone offered these to you—understandably. But despite the age of the contents, food (and other) packaging can provide a wealth of information about an era, from design standards to daily habits. We’ve just digitized about two dozen food boxes, cans, bottles, and jars dating from the 1920s to the 2000s. Check out exotic anchovies, oyster sauce, and truffles, or see hundreds of examples of all types of containers (food and otherwise), on our collections site.
(FYI, thanks to our Conservation Department, the contents of the food packages have now been disposed of, leaving clean artifacts for long-term preservation.)
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
One of the most distinctive features of Greenfield Village is the period-authentic clothing worn by the presenters, all created on site by our Clothing Studio. Many of the designs they create are based on objects from our own costume collection, including clothing, shoes, hats, and other accessories. We’ve just digitized a selection of bonnets, including this delicate 19th century example. See detail shots of two dozen bonnets, ranging from the very simple to the very ornate, in our Digital Collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Just Added to Our Digital Collections: More from the Wright Brothers
The Wright Brothers are perennial favorites among our visitors and staff, and so we have just digitized a couple dozen Wright-related photos (including this one showing Orville prepping for a 1908 flight), pamphlets, and other items from our archives, as selected by Chief Archivist Terry Hoover. Explore more Wright Brothers material in our digital collections related to the Wright Brothers, Orville Wright, and Wilbur Wright—or pay a visit to the Wright family home and cycle shop.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
archives, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, Wright Brothers
This is the inaugural post of a new regular feature on The Henry Ford’s blog showcasing an item from the physical collections of The Henry Ford that has been recently added to our digital collections. In addition to an image, we’ll provide a brief bit of background information and links or hints for searching. A lot of the objects we’re digitizing are not currently on display, so in many cases the digital collections are the only way to see them. Please enjoy, and let us know if you have any questions about our digitization efforts.
This week we’ve just added an object that may look familiar to our visitors—this eighteenth-century daybed is currently on display in Henry Ford Museum in the “Fully Furnished” exhibit. View the daybed and over 270 pieces of furniture and related items by visiting our Digital Collections. Let us know if your favorite piece from “Fully Furnished” has been added yet!
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Henry Ford Museum, by Ellice Engdahl, furnishings, digital collections
“We’re going to let people try and hack the museum?!”
When I first heard this a few months back, my jaw dropped. Hack the museum?! What?! Are you serious? What museum would even think of doing such a thing? Well, The Henry Ford would. We were indeed opening ourselves up to hacking, but not like you would first think.
As part of Maker Faire Detroit 2013, our partners at Compuware came up with the great idea to host our first-ever hackathon inside Henry Ford Museum with the challenge of “creating an application which combines The Henry Ford’s digital collection with the imagination and power that are an essential part of the mobile culture today.” We were opening ourselves up to hacking, but by way of APIs used with our digital collections.
Nestled above the “Heroes of the Sky” exhibit toward the back of the museum, six teams worked all day Saturday trying to create the most unique app for us possible. Nineteen participants, some local, some from out of town, consumed a lot of caffeinated beverages and wrote a lot of code as the faire happened around them.
Mike Butman, our Chief Information Officer at The Henry Ford, worked with the teams on how best to access the collections’ APIs throughout the day. For Mike, the hackathon was not only a way to see new ideas, but a source of inspiration and personal challenge.
“It was extremely invigorating,” Mike told me. “Not just to see the technical components, but to see the outside perspective and how these individuals could develop something for our guests to interact with.”
With their work done at the end of the day on Saturday, all that was left was a presentation to our team of judges. The six teams presented their ideas and made their cases in front of our judges. The judges that had the tough job of selecting just one winner included:
In the end, we had one winner and two runners-up (I said it was a tough choice). Team 42 and Chi-Ackers took second place with Sam Harrell of Team Sam taking home top honors. What was the app that wowed our judges so much?
The app used image recognition with computer vision, kind of like augmented reality.
Guests take the app and move it across a sign. The app recognizes points on the sign and pulls related information from the digital collections of The Henry Ford.
The app can then also translate the information into dozens of languages. It’s easy to use. Instead of looking for information on multiple web pages within your mobile browser, all related items are pulled together all in one place.
Sam had been thinking of an app like this for a while. The hackathon, with the access to our APIs, was just what he needed to pull it all together.
“I loved the thrill of starting something from scratch and building it out,” he said.
Will you see the app anytime soon? There’s consideration here at the institution of being able to make something out of the results from the hackathons, like the one at Maker Faire Detroit, in the future.
For Compuware’s Matthew David, suggesting a hackathon as part of their Maker Faire Detroit sponsorship was a natural idea. Hackathons all across the globe continue to gain popularity. For small groups of people, a hackathon often gives them the opportunity to not only be developers but also entrepreneurs. Did you know that the Facebook “Like” button was the result of a Facebook hackathon?!
“When you work on emerging technology, you’re so very passionate about it,” Matthew said. “Being up to your eyeballs in code, racing against the clock for a fun prize... people are doing it for the honor of winning. They light up Silicon Valley passions outside of Silicon Valley. Folks really can do something. These solutions emerging and then happening? That’s pretty fantastic.”
Digital Collections Initiative Manager Ellice Engdahl proudly watched the presentations the next day on Sunday. To the leader of the team creating and publishing our digital collections, the idea of allowing outside developers access to our raw data meant a lot.
“The true purpose of digitizing our collections, both on the floor and in storage, is to make them available. If our digital assets aren’t used, there’s no point in creating them,” Ellice said. “It was fabulous to see creative programmers find new ways to share our materials.”
Ellice also really appreciated the thoughtful way each team approached the challenge and brought their own perspective to it.
“Team 42 was interested in engaging diverse audiences, Team Chi-Ackers wanted to encourage learning through collections-related gaming, Team CIA encouraged easy sharing from the museum to visitors and from visitors to visitors, Team Handsome Quartet encouraged users to gain social badges through viewing collections objects, Team Sam thought about how the existing labels on the Museum floor could be improved and enhanced, and Team Wambatech incorporated outside videos and images alongside our own assets,” she said. “It was great to see such a variety of results coming out of the teams’ original goals and perspectives, and exciting to think of the diverse audiences that would appreciate all the teams’ efforts.”
While the hackathon has come and gone for 2013, the enthusiasm is here to stay. You can keep up to date with Maker Faire Detroit updates on our website and through our enthusiast channel, OnMaking.
Continue Readingby Lish Dorset, digital collections, technology, making, Maker Faire Detroit, computers
The Henry Ford, like many cultural institutions, has been working on digitizing its collections—i.e., photographing and describing them, and making this information available online. While what we have completed is only a drop in the bucket given the vastness of our collections (25 million archival documents and photographs, and 1 million objects), we have made a lot of progress this year and wanted to share what we’ve accomplished.
There are two big projects we took on this year (in addition to many smaller ones). The first was digitization of 250 objects in support of the mobile version of our website. This included adding photographs and descriptions for the many Greenfield Village buildings—for example, check out the Menlo Park Laboratory, the Daggett Farmhouse, the Armington & Sims Machine Shop, and even the Firestone Farm Chicken Shed.
In Henry Ford Museum, we photographed and described objects from each of the permanent exhibits that we considered “can’t miss” artifacts. You’ll see some things you might expect, like the Wienermobile, the Dymaxion House, and the Rosa Parks bus, but have you ever gotten to see some of our lesser-known treasures, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt’s rocking chair, a Brownie camera, flintlock pistols, and a Paul Revere coffeepot?.
The second big project for 2012 was creation of our Curators’ Choice lists. We asked our curators to select the 25 most important objects in our collections in each of 7 categories. (Henry Ford got 50, because, well, his name is on our door—and because 2013 will mark his 150th birthday.) There were three criteria the curators used for their selections: national significance, uniqueness to our institution, and resonance to museum visitors. It tells you a bit about the scope and import of our collections that many of these significant items are not on display—but you can now view them all online. They range from a massive cable strander to a tiny scrap of a poem, from a 17th century horse racing trophy to a 1990s cell phone, from an elegant evening dress
In addition to these two major projects, we also spent 2012 digitizing selections from throughout our collections, many with ties to current exhibits and events. Have you seen our visiting LEGO® exhibit and want more? Check out our digital collection of building toys. Did you make it out to Hallowe’en in Greenfield Village or Holiday Nights? Take a look at some of the vintage greeting cards that help inspire our décor for these events. Were you able to participate in some of our special weekend muster events? Learn more about our collections relating to the War of 1812 or the American Civil War—you may have seen some of these objects on display during your visit!
In addition to the above, we have digitized selections from the following areas of our collections for your immediate browsing pleasure.
From our transportation collections, you can review the Morgan Gies collection, wonderful lantern slides from the early 20th century New York to Paris and New York to Seattle races, and classic design drawings from Bill Mitchell and Virgil Exner.
If you prefer paper-based artifacts, you might take a look at our digital cabinet cards, cartes-de-visite, and trade cards. These provide a glimpse of many aspects of 19th century life.
If you are interested in the historical figures who helped shape American history, try our digital collections relating to designer Don Chadwick, racecar driver Lyn St. James, agricultural pioneer George Washington Carver, and a vastly expanded selection of artifacts related to Henry Ford. We also have a variety of personal documents from notables including Abraham Lincoln, Aaron Burr, George Washington, Mark Twain, and Alexander Graham Bell. Read their own words in their own hand from the comfort of your home!
But wait, there’s more! Check out quilts, coverlets, stoves, telephones, lunchboxes, patent models, steam engines, toys, typewriters, and violins, as well as many objects from our World’s Fair and agricultural collections.
Phew.
In total, with all of the above objects digitized (and, believe it or not, many more I did not mention), we added about 8,000 new objects to our collections site in 2012! Still, we have much, much more to do. We are still in the process of putting our 2013 list together, but we know we will be tackling areas of our collections related to agricultural, industrial, and technological innovations, as well as automobile racing. In addition, we’ll continue digitizing collections objects to bring some context to several 2013 milestones: the 150th birthday of Henry Ford, the 100th birthday of Rosa Parks, and the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death.
The single biggest reason we have embarked on this massive digitization project is to provide easy public access to our collections, the vast majority of which are not on display. As we reflect on our efforts last year, I and everyone on our digitization team hope that you are finding our digital collections as fascinating, enjoyable, and informative as we are. If there are areas of our collection you would like to see us digitize in 2013, please let us know in the comments below or via our Facebook page.
Ellice Engdahl, Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, is very excited by the digitization promise of 2013.
Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, digitization, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford
I spent this summer interning at the Benson Ford Research Center helping the effort to digitize the museum’s enormous collection. When I started working here, I told a friend our collection has more 20 million 2-D objects. They replied, “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff about cars.” Well, we do have a lot of stuff about cars—everything from old concept car drawings to bumper stickers through the ages. But The Henry Ford collection also includes many other objects.The Henry Ford Museum was established in order to collect and preserve pieces of everyday life that would tell the story of America to later generations. In my time as a scanner, I helped to digitize many objects that we are not exhibiting — I helped to prepare these objects for digital exhibition on our website so we could continue to tell stories about the history of America, and not only that, but reach an even wider audience for those stories.
The Henry Ford online collection is a 24/7 digital exhibition of various artifacts from American history that the museum has collected over the years, an exhibit that keeps growing, an exhibit that you can visit any time, anywhere, for free — if you have Wi-Fi. Before working here, I knew the museum’s collection was impressive, but I never understood how big the collection really was. If I were to keep scanning images, adding about 60 new artifacts to the website every day, it would take me over 50 years to finish updating the website — and I’d be old enough to retire.
The collection is not only enormous, it is also incredibly diverse. I have scanned old trade cards, original baseball handbooks, and pictures from events at the Chicago and New York World’s Fairs. This was an awesome opportunity because many of these objects have never been on exhibit in either Greenfield Village or the museum. Working here, I learned more about the museum’s impressive collection, and in the process, more about American history, facts that we often ignore in history courses, the experience of everyday life.
For example, I spent some time scanning albums of the Unser family. I did know about Bobby Unser’s career in NASCAR, but I learned more about his day-to-day life and his relationship with his family — I saw him as a person I could relate to instead of a distant historical figure. I learned about his love of travel, his fondness for deer, and his passion for cooking chili.
Perusing the archives changed the way I think about history — I understand how events and people from the past are similar to my own life. Drawing these parallels makes the past more familiar and helps to explain how and why things have changed. I enjoyed my time working at the museum very much, and I encourage readers to spend some time looking at the online collection, a fun and enriching historical resource.
Keshav Prasad is a sophomore at University of Michigan, and spent the summer interning for The Henry Ford Digitization Project.
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, archives, digital collections, digitization, by Keshav Prasad
