Posts Tagged digital collections
In the early 1960s, designers Charles and Ray Eames set out to reveal the wonder they saw in math through an engaging and interactive exhibit they called Mathematica: A World of Numbers … and Beyond. The designers, perhaps best known for the iconic Eames lounge chair, used models and demonstrations to bring to life concepts such as probability, geometry, the Moebius strip, and more.
In 2015, The Henry Ford acquired an original Mathematica exhibit, and is currently working to restore the interactive components before installing the exhibit on the Museum floor in 2017. We’ve begun to digitize some of the signage and reading material from the exhibit, including this reading stand that discusses, among other things, the “Man Machine Interface.”
Visit our Digital Collections to view zoomable detail shots, or to see the other Mathematica signage digitized so far.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Henry Ford Museum, by Ellice Engdahl, Eames, digital collections
American Style and Spirit: 130 Years of Fashions and Lives of an Entrepreneurial Family is a temporary exhibit opening in Henry Ford Museum on November 5. The exhibit is based on an extensive donation of garments and accessories, all used by the Roddis family of Marshfield, Wisconsin. These artifacts are exceptional in demonstrating how clothing tells us something about the person who wears it, while also illuminating broader stories of American life. We have just digitized a number of Roddis Collection pieces, including this 1952 day dress.
To learn more, visit our Digital Collections to see the other pieces digitized thus far and watch for more to be added in the weeks leading up to the exhibit opening.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Wisconsin, women's history, fashion, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, American Style and Spirit, 21st century, 2010s
Elizabeth Parke Firestone (1897–1990) was the wife of Harvey S. Firestone, Jr., son of the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. As a well-heeled and fashion-conscious woman, she both traveled to and corresponded with many famous couture houses in Paris, including the House of Dior.
An inquiry from Dior last year led to our digitization of many of the articles of Christian Dior clothing in our collection that belonged to Mrs. Firestone, but when we dug even further, we turned up over 370 Dior design drawings, mostly dating from the 1950s. Many, like the 1955 “Fête a Trianon,” are intricately colored, and include handwritten notes and fabric swatches, giving potential customers a taste of their glamour. Visit our Digital Collections to peruse all of these Dior design drawings.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
drawings, design, Firestone family, Elizabeth Parke Firestone, women's history, fashion, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
If you know a bit about The Henry Ford, you probably know that one of our areas of expertise is automobile racing. Along with many artifacts, we hold vast amounts of archival materials on the topic, including the Dave Friedman Collection of hundreds of thousands of racing images, among other materials. We’ve just digitized a grouping of nearly 500 images from the 1968 American Road Race of Champions (ARRC) held at Riverside, California—bringing the total number of images we’ve digitized from this collection to over 20,000.
Visit our Digital Collections to see this dramatic 1968 ARRC shot—or browse all the digitized images from the Dave Friedman Collection.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Hanks Silk Mill was acquired by Henry Ford in 1929, moved to Greenfield Village in 1931, and reconstructed in 1932, with a grove of mulberry trees (the standard diet of silkworms) planted nearby in 1935. The mulberry grove still stands, but the mill is a fairly small, unassuming-looking building, which belies the “firsts” in its history. Established in 1810, it is believed to be the first water-powered silk mill in the United States, and perhaps also to have produced the first machine-made silk.
As part of our ongoing effort to digitize photos of the buildings of Greenfield Village, we’ve just digitized over a dozen images of the Hanks Silk Mill, including this 1931 photo of the mill on its original site, with a sign proudly proclaiming its heritage. Visit our Digital Collections to view all the newly digitized images.
manufacturing, fashion, by Ellice Engdahl, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, digital collections
We continue to work on our IMLS-grant funded project to conserve, catalog, photograph, rehouse, and digitize 900 artifacts from our electrical distribution equipment collection. A number of the meters and other artifacts we’ve turned up during that project were created by the Fort Wayne Electric Works (also known as the Fort Wayne Electric Corporation), an Indiana company that manufactured electrical equipment and other items in the late 19th century. To accompany the artifacts, we’ve just digitized photographs from our Fort Wayne Electric Works archival collection, which show various parts of the factory around 1894—including this shot of the testing and calibrating laboratory.
Connect our Fort Wayne artifacts with our Fort Wayne photographs for yourself by visiting our Digital Collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Additional Readings:
- 1899 Locomobile Runabout: Freedom on Wheels
- Maudslay Production Lathe, circa 1800
- Gas-Steam Engine, 1916, Used to Generate Electricity at Highland Park Plant
- Surprising Stories from IMLS Discoveries
Indiana, 19th century, power, photographs, manufacturing, IMLS grant, electricity, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, archives
If you’ve visited Henry Ford Museum, this bench might look familiar to you. In fact, you might have sat on this bench or one of about two dozen exactly like it during your visit. However, this one is now off-limits to sitting, as it has found a place in our collections. The bench was commissioned in 1939 by Edsel Ford for use at what was then known as the Edison Institute, now The Henry Ford. It was designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, a leader in early industrial design, at the height of his career. We’ve just digitized the bench—visit our Digital Collections to see other artifacts from our collections related to Walter Dorwin Teague, including correspondence and blueprints associated with the bench.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
20th century, 1930s, Henry Ford Museum, furnishings, digital collections, design, by Ellice Engdahl
The Grand Army of the Republic (often known by its abbreviation, G.A.R.) was an organization of U.S. Civil War veterans who had served for the Union. In existence from 1866 through 1956, it peaked in 1890 at over 400,000 members and 7,000 posts. The G.A.R. scheduled meetings and other gatherings for members, provided charitable donations to the needy, supported the construction and maintenance of Civil War memorials and sites, and became a powerful political lobbying group. In 1868, the group’s commander-in-chief initiated an observance known as Decoration Day, which we still commemorate today as Memorial Day.
We’ve just digitized over 30 G.A.R. badges, medals, and insignia from our collections, including this badge from a 1908 encampment at Toledo, Ohio. Browse all of the digitized G.A.R.-related artifacts by visiting our Digital Collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Grand Army of the Republic, by Ellice Engdahl, veterans, digital collections, Civil War
The collections of The Henry Ford contain dozens of bandboxes, 19th-century containers originally used to store neckbands (the source of their name), but frequently also used to hold hats or other clothing/accessories. These inexpensive containers were made of pasteboard or wood and then covered in paper—in many cases, as with this vibrant example, wallpaper. Over 70 of these fragile objects can now be viewed in our Digital Collections—and check out the ones that have 360-degree views, showing interiors lined with newspapers of the time.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
decorative arts, furnishings, 19th century, home life, fashion, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
Earlier this year, The Henry Ford launched a brand-new, award-winning institutional website. Part of this project—but a big part!—is a completely reimagined Digital Collections. The Henry Ford has been scaling up its collections digitization efforts since 2010, and you’ll find tens of thousands of artifacts available online (some of the most recent additions here), with many new and enhanced features on the new site. Though we hope the new Digital Collections experience is intuitive and easy to use, we wanted to highlight some of the features for those who might not yet have had a chance to dig in and explore.
One of the best things about our Digital Collections is that they are now fully integrated with the rest of our website. This means that any search you try on our website will return results from our educational resources, our Digital Collections, and the rest of the site, in convenient tabbed format. 
Digital Collections artifact results from a site search on thehenryford.org.
If you’re specifically interested in our artifacts, you can easily perform collections-specific searches from the homepage of our Digital Collections. By entering a word or phrase in the single box, you will search three kinds of records—individual artifacts, archival collections, and expert sets, with each group of results returning in its own tab. For artifacts, you can limit your search results by date, the type of artifact (objects, photos, documents, videos/film, or audio), the location of the artifact (Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, the Benson Ford Research Center, or not on exhibit), the special multimedia types available for that artifact (360-degree views, audio, or video), and whether there are high-resolution images available for automated download for a service fee. Search results can be sorted by relevance, title, or date.
Search results from a search from the homepage of our Digital Collections.
If you need to get even more detailed, you can, with one of my favorite new features on the Digital Collections site, Advanced Search. While the Digital Collections homepage search features a single box and returns results based on relevance, the more sophisticated advanced search lets you combine any of 20 different parameters, such as collection title, color, material, or creator name. Want to find orange automobiles? Or velvet dresses? Or photographs from the Fair Lane Papers collection? With Advanced Search, you can! An online help guide explains the many different fields and provides sample values for each to assist you in constructing your search.
Once you’ve found an artifact you want to check out, you’ll notice that the look of each artifact record has changed. You will now see more information about each object, and it is easier and faster to flip through the images of each object—or zoom in to see fine details. Some objects may include 360-degree views, audio, and/or video. Each record features a “contact us about this artifact” button, through which you can e-mail our collections experts in the Benson Ford Research Center to ask questions or provide additional information or corrections to our data.
The look of an artifact record in our new Digital Collections.
Many Digital Collections records now display related artifacts, so while viewing something like the record for a historic photo of the Autogiro, you’ll be able to easily jump to the Autogiro itself. “Related content,” such as a story or video we’ve created including that object or other objects from our collection, will also appear where appropriate (see the record for our Apple 1 for examples). Artifacts may be shared via Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, or as “artifact cards,” short, portable versions of collections records that you can embed on your blog or website. Social sharing links and instructions for using artifact cards are available via a link on every collections record.
Archival collection records are brand-new to our Digital Collections. Previously, you needed to use our library catalog in order to find broad information about specific archival collections. Our new site allows us to include information from archival finding aids alongside the records that represent individual items from those collections. We will continue to add these archival records as collections are acquired and processed.
A record for one of our many archival collections.
Expert sets have been totally overhauled. They still collect groups of artifacts selected by our collections experts on specific themes, but are much more robust and visually appealing. As noted above, they are also searchable directly from the Digital Collections homepage. But you don’t have to be an expert to create your own set… Anyone can! Just click the “Add to Set” button on any artifact record and log in or create an account. It is also easy to share both expert sets and user sets via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail.
One of hundreds of artifact Expert Sets created by our collections staff.
Another notable new feature of the site is that many of our collections images are available for immediate high-resolution download for a service fee. Anywhere you see the BUY icon on an image (or use the relevant search limiter), you can purchase that image for personal or educational use in accordance with the terms of service listed on the site. We will continue to add more purchasable images to our Digital Collections over time. Lower-res images may be downloaded without a fee.
Lastly, if you ever tried to use our old Digital Collections site on a smartphone or tablet, you might have found it a frustrating experience. The new Digital Collections site is completely responsive, and all features will work equally well on your phone, tablet, or desktop computer.
Please try out our Digital Collections, if you haven't already, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments about your experience. Our hope is that our new Digital Collections makes it easier and more fun for you to find, enjoy, and share the many treasures of The Henry Ford!
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digital collections
