Posts Tagged digitization
Introduced in the United States in 1984, the Transformers have been among the most popular toy lines ever since. They were robots who could change into sportscars, jets, spaceships, and dinosaurs. The appeal was obvious. Cartoons and comic books established a storyline about the heroic Autobots protecting Earth from the evil Decepticons. The above sales brochure was included with boxed Transformers toys in 1984.
The Henry Ford has a small collection of some of the early Transformers. Most of the toys in our collection have a single image as part of their catalog records, but we wanted to be able to show these “robots in disguise” in all of their configurations.
Each configuration needed to be lit differently, because the shadows and reflections would change as the toy’s parts were moved. As many as eight different light sources were used for each shot.
We also found that some of the robots’ joints had become extremely tight from age, making them difficult to transform. Other joints had become loose, making the robots difficult to stand.
This is just one example of how having a little insider knowledge (in this case, of the geekier kind) can help better document and display a collection item.
The rest of the Transformers can be viewed on our collections website.
Jim Orr did not offer to help photograph the Transformers as a way to spend an afternoon playing with some of his favorite toys.
20th century, 1980s, toys and games, popular culture, photography, digitization, by Jim Orr
CAN-DO Can Do It!: The Henry Ford’s Digitized Collection Hits a Milestone
As regular readers of this blog probably already know, The Henry Ford is in the middle of a big effort to digitize its vast collections of objects, documents, and photographs. Internally, this project is called CAN-DO: Collections Access Network for Digital Objects.
In mid-June, CAN-DO hit a major milestone: over 8,000 objects photographed/scanned, documented and available online!
So we did what any hard-working team would do: we ate cake. And because of the busy meeting schedules we maintain, we had to have our cake party at 9 AM on a Tuesday...but this did not faze us.
As we ate our breakfast cake, we started to reflect a bit on the long road we’ve traveled. If you were checking our collections website last July, you would have been able to browse 516 objects from our collections. In a year, that number has expanded by a factor of more than 16. So what are you able to access now that you couldn’t a year ago?
For starters, all of the approximately 900 artifacts in the Driving America exhibit within Henry Ford Museum, from some of the largest...
...to some of the smallest.
You can also view some of your old favorites from Automobile in American Life, like Tom Thumb’s bicycle:
You can learn about the history of innovation through our extensive collection of patent models, like this one by Thomas Edison…
…or this patent model for a solar lamp — dating from 1871:
If you love annual events such as Hallowe'en in Greenfield Village or Holiday Nights in Greenfield Village, you might be able to recognize some of the historic imagery we draw upon in these vintage greeting cards, like this 1932 Christmas card...
…and this Hallowe’en example from the same era.
Or, you can relive the excitement of the 1908 New York to Paris Race with a series of digitized lantern slides, like this one, covering the entire worldwide route:
But that’s not all you’ll find in our digitized collections — not by a long shot. You can also check out collections relating to automotive designers Bill Mitchell and Virgil Exner, a variety of 19th century cabinet cards and cartes-de-visite, photographs and souvenirs from World’s Fairs from the 1870s through the 1980s, letters from a variety of notable Americans, the buildings of Greenfield Village (plus photographs of many of the buildings on their original sites — do a search on your favorite to see what we have), objects related to female racecar driver Lyn St. James, violins, quilts, advertising trade cards, photographs and memorabilia related to Presidential transport and even some of our toy collection and a few lunchboxes.
And there is still more!
The links and images above provide a few pointers into our digital collections, but the best way to discover them is to search them for yourself. Visit our collections site today and let us know what you find!
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, and finds something new and fascinating among our 8000+ online collections objects daily.
21st century, 2010s, digitization, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford
If you’re a regular reader of The Henry Ford’s blog, you might have noticed several recent blog posts about The Henry Ford’s ongoing effort to digitize its collection – from a special project to photograph 120 of the collection’s vehicles to the rapid capture of 2D archival materials.
Capturing the 3D collection in electronic format has its own joys and pitfalls. The three-dimensional objects have a (sometimes substantial!) weight and heft to them, they are in various states of fragility, they are on exhibit or well-packed in storage, and in some cases, they may have particular complications in handling due to their age or the materials from which they are made.
Take, for example, our hubcap collection.
“Hubcaps?” you might ask. “Why hubcaps?”
Well, The Henry Ford has collected hundreds of hubcaps. Matt Anderson, our Curator of Transportation, explains their importance this way:
“The hubcap’s evolution mirrors that of the car itself. What began as a purely practical device grew into a stylish form of expression. Manufacturers mark hubcaps with logos and use different designs to complement a vehicle’s overall form, from elegant wire to sporty magnesium alloy. Some owners install custom caps, further personalizing their vehicles.”
In short, there is more to a hubcap than meets the eye, which is why they found their way into our digitization process recently.
The first step in digitization is locating and retrieving the object(s) we want to digitize, which are usually either in on- or off-site storage or on exhibit somewhere on the premises and can only be retrieved by staff members specially trained to handle the objects.
Once retrieved, objects need varying levels of conservation. This can involve something as simple as cleaning, or much more involved procedures to restore the stability of an object. Here, conservation specialist Marlene Gray examines and treats boxes and boxes of hubcaps.
Once they are all clean and shiny, the hubcaps are carefully moved over to our photography studio, where they get the glamour treatment. In the photo below, Conservation Specialist Sarah Kollar and our photographer Rudy Ruzicska pick out the next hubcap to be photographed, using the camera set-up behind and just to the right of Rudy in the below photograph.
Some complex objects get many photographs from multiple angles, while some, like the humble hubcap, get one good chance to shine (literally).
Once the photograph(s) have been taken, the digital images have to be named, appropriately sized, and moved into our collections database, which looks a lot like Sarah sitting at a computer with spreadsheets nearby.
From there, we create a description of the object within our collections database. Collections documentation specialists within our registrar's office enter the material the hubcap is made of, noting its color, dimensions, any inscriptions it might have and any other information about it or its origin that they can glean, which often entails some research and consultation with curators.
Meanwhile, other collections documentation specialists and curators write brief narratives for many of the objects, explaining how and when they were used and their historical significance. When all this information is entered into our collections database, it looks like this:
Once the object is described within our collections system, and once it has at least one good photograph, it is ready for prime time!
Right now, each digitized object goes to two different digital homes: our collections website and our digitized collection on the interactive touchscreen kiosks within the Driving America exhibit.
You can save favorite items into sets and share them back and forth across both venues, adding new favorites as you go!
What hubcaps (or other collections items) will make it into your sets?
Ellice Engdahl, Digital Collections Initiative Manager at The Henry Ford, finds hundreds of hubcaps surprisingly compelling.
collections care, conservation, photography, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization
The coming of a New Year is a great time to set resolutions, and for 2012, The Henry Ford has picked at least one doozy that we are very excited to share!
Over the course of the year, we will be digitizing our most “significant” icons in each of the core categories in our collections — and making those available on our collections website to anyone who is interested.
So what does that mean, and why are we so delighted about it?
Digitization is the process of making photos and information about the collections of The Henry Ford available online. In a way, this is a process that dates back to the founding of the institution, as artifacts have been catalogued and photographed over the years for internal purposes.
However, the information and images we’ve gathered and the ways in which we’ve stored those for our own usage don’t necessarily equate to the robust web presentation that we want to share with the world— so we have been spending a lot of time updating and standardizing catalog records, taking great new photographs of the collection, and writing brief narratives on the purpose and meaning of each object.
This is all part of a big project we’ve been calling CAN-DO: Collections Access Network for Digital Objects.
We really got going in earnest with this effort in 2011, with the bulk of the objects digitized either in or related to the new Driving America exhibit, which opens at the end of January. The Henry Ford obviously has very strong transportation collections, and this means that right now our digitized collections contain everything from the very rare and beautiful Bugatti...
...to an iconic Charles Sheeler photograph of the Ford Rouge plant in the late 1920s...
…and everything in between.
As 2011 began winding down, we started to think about what we would digitize in 2012. The Henry Ford has an embarrassment of riches in its collections, including hundreds of thousands of 3D objects and about 25 million 2D artifacts housed in the Benson Ford Research Center. Digitizing it all will be a multi-year, if not multi-decade, effort. What, we asked ourselves, should be our focus in 2012?
The answer was obvious: We need to make sure the public has digital access to the most “significant” artifacts at The Henry Ford. I put the term “significant” in quotation marks purposely, as significance has multiple meanings. Few could argue that an artifact like the city bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is not a significant historical object. It is also institutionally unique. Many museums have civil rights artifacts, but there is only one Rosa Parks bus, and the only place to find it is at The Henry Ford.
The other dimension of “significance” is personal resonance. Certainly the Rosa Parks bus has personal significance for many people. But there’s also a pretty hefty degree to which personal significance diverges. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily expect this Buck Rogers poster to have personal significance for a large percentage of the public.
For me, though, this happens to be one of my very favorite collections objects that we’ve digitized thus far. It features a space pterodactyl, a disintegrator ray, rocketships, and many spacemen in dapper outfits, all illustrated with bright colors and fantastic graphic detail. These all happen to be things that I enjoy (space pterodactyls being a new but noteworthy addition to the list), so to me, this is particularly interesting.
We’ve been having a lot of interesting conversations about all the aspects of “significance” and how they relate to the collections of The Henry Ford, and have started throwing out ideas and making lists. Over the course of 2012, you will see these objects begin to show up on our collections website, but you’ll also hear about them in other ways — via blog posts from staff members, in the curators’ Pics of the Month and any other ways we can think of to share the stories that these objects tell.
We could not be more excited to start this project, and hope you are excited about it as well. Check our collections website frequently to visit your old favorites from the collections and discover new ones!
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, which she thinks is quite possibly the coolest job ever — even if it’s a hazard of the job that her favorite collections object changes about 10 times a day.
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization, digital collections
