You’re a click away from entering to win passage for four to the exhibition that everyone is talking about. Travel back to 1912 through the ship’s construction, ill-fated voyage and recent artifact rescue. The prize includes admission to the museum.

It’s The Henry Ford’s Facebook Titanic Ticket Tuesday giveaway, and entering is easy.

If you’re a new or long-time friend of The Henry Ford – America’s Greatest History Attraction page on Facebook, when you submit an online entry – just like that – you earn a chance to win in the weekly giveaway.

You increase your chance of winning when you like our other Facebook pages for

• The Henry Ford IMAX Theatre
• OnInnovation

You also increase your chance each time one of your

• friends enter the giveaway via your share

Tickets are randomly selected each Tuesday through Sept. 17, 2012.

So, get  on board and click here to enter from our Facebook page. And be sure to share.

As you might expect, there are some details, rules and other tidbits of important info relating to the Titanic Ticket Tuesday giveaway

It’s a great weekend to explore two great stories at one great place.

Saturday is opening day for Titanic: An Artifact Exhibition at Henry Ford Museum. Tickets are for timed entrances beginning as early as 9:30 a.m. This 10,000 square foot exhibition features more than 300 artifacts, complete room recreations as well as a replica of the ship’s grand staircase.

More than 250 of the 300 artifacts displayed at Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition have never before been shown in Michigan.

Moving through this exhibition, visitors will be taken back in time to 1912 and travel through the life of the Titanic – from the ship’s construction, to its on-board passengers, its ill-fated voyage and the amazing artifact rescue efforts that involved divers returning to the sunken ship in recent years.

Check out the website for more information on ticket prices and available entry times.

The IMAX documentary film Titanica also opens this weekend. Our blogger gave it nice review, and says the whole family will enjoy it. The 45-minute movie is a great accompaniment to the exhibition.

The film has a start time every hour in The Henry Ford IMAX Theatre throughout the days Saturday and Sunday beginning at 10 and 11:05 a.m.; 12:10, 1:15, 2:20, 3:25, 4:30, 5:35 and 6:40 p.m.

This 1912 Rambler Knickerbocker Limousine would have carried first-class passengers of the Titanic in style. You can see the car for yourself in our Driving America exhibition..

While you’re here, be sure to make the rounds through the museum and spend some time enjoying the story that Driving America tells. Check out the interactive kiosks, explore the Driving America Timeline, take a lunch break at Lamy’s Diner and then sit back and relax while you watch the short film in the Drive-in Theater.

Oh, and be sure to take a look at our newest artifact in Driving America.

If you aren’t  yet, it’s a good time to consider becoming a member at The Henry Ford. It has its privileges, and with all the good things happening in the museum and the upcoming April 14 opening of Greenfield Village, it’s the perfect time to put a membership to use.

Remember these?

For those of you who may not, it’s a 5.25-inch floppy disk – a very important storage medium for many years until superseded by the 3.5-inch micro version, then CDs, DVDs and flash drives.

If you were to come across one of these now, how would you open it?

Odds are that you don’t have the hardware to even read it, let alone the software to open that photo of you in your new parachute pants listening to that Flock of Seagulls album. For most of us, the data on this disk would be essentially lost – impossible or very expensive to retrieve.

The problem of the 5.25-inch floppy disk is an example of the challenges posed by digital content. Unlike a physical photograph or negative, you can’t just stick a digital file in a box and forget about it for 50 years. Hardware and software obsolescence, the natural degradation of the file over time (called bit rot), and the inability to find poorly described files, all contribute to making the preservation of digital information a somewhat daunting challenge.

Archivists face the same challenge as home photographers when preserving digital content. However, when archivists are asked to preserve digital content, it can be things like data from space missions, medical records, government documents, or important historical materials. Fortunately, archives and library professionals have come up with a set of best practices and standards as a guide to ensure that digital content is safe and accessible for years to come. In fact, the development and application of these best practices and standards have taken the form of a specialization called digital preservation.

As an archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center, which serves as the archives and library of The Henry Ford, one of my jobs is to ensure that the digital assets of the organization are retained following the tenets of digital preservation.

And although The Henry Ford is creating digital content at a higher volume than the typical home photographer, much of the digital preservation practice that we follow at the museum is very applicable to the home user.

Follow the links below to learn about some professional digital preservation concepts, as well as some tips on how you can apply them when storing digital photographs at home.

The digital master

File format compression

Which format?

Storage media and backups

Finding your files

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.

Included in the scheduled happenings for this weekend’s Celebrate Black History! program in Henry Ford Museum are performances in the Museum Plaza by local roots and blues musician Rev. Robert Jones, Sr. who combines storytelling, vocals and instrumental music showcasing early African-American music and culture.

He will perform at 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, in the Museum Plaza.

Another highlight is The Henry Ford’s own staff actor Tony Lucas’ dramatic performance of “Elijah: The Real McCoy.” Also in the Museum plaza, it starts at 12:30 p.m., 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m., Saturday and Sunday.

This weekend’s programs share stories of the northern migration – an era that is important to the journey and legacy of the African-American story. Here’s a look at all of the programming at Henry Ford Museum during Black History Month.

Five miles of awesome.

That pretty much sums up the Behind the Scenes Tour I took at Benson Ford Research Center.

I confess, as many times as I’ve walked past the building when visiting Greenfield Village – it’s located in the Josephine F. Ford Plaza near the village entrance – I had no idea whatsoever what even went on in that building.

Now that I know, I can truly say the experience has only proven yet again that there is so much more than what meets the eye at The Henry Ford.

The tour was expertly led by Kathy Steiner, who is head of access services at the Benson Ford Research Center, and Terry Hoover, the chief archivist there. If you have a small group of friends or folks (up to 15 people) who love history, this a is an excellent outing.

A look down some of the five miles of shelving that hold archives at the Benson Ford Research Center.

There are five miles of shelving at Benson Ford Research Center. Of course, it’s what’s on and in those shelves that makes the place so interesting. That, and the fact that the center continues to make the treasury of artifacts so carefully housed and catalogued there more and more accessible to the public through a variety of services.

Visitors on the tour were treated to a look at the carefully preserved and catalogued quilts in this cabinet.

Benson Ford Research Center is just one of many storage areas on The Henry Ford campus. Items at the center include documents and artifacts that need the same kind of climate-controlled storage as paper. So you’re not going to find a automobile in the stacks, but depending on your interests, you will find some significant, valuable, historic, cool and at times even quirky treasures.

This file holds sewing patterns from various periods in American history.

Among other things, the research center houses the early business records and nearly half a million photographs from the very beginnings of Ford Motor Company through part of the 1960s. This collection occupies approximately ten thousand cubic feet in the three-story facility.

While on the tour, Terry showed us the very first bank register for Ford Motor Company – which was Henry Ford’s third attempt in the industry. The company was practically down to its last dime (more like $200) when the first Ford automobile was sold, and the rest – as they say – is history.

It was really inspiring to see that artifact up-close. Its significance in industry alone is mind-boggling. With Henry Ford’s success and then dedication to collecting, preserving and sharing the stuff of America life through his creation of the Edison Institute (now The Henry Ford), I have to say that while standing among those collections in Benson Ford Research Center, the importance of that bank register was profoundly tangible.

Other records that are collected at Benson Ford Research Center include early business papers from companies such as Herman Miller, the Heinz Company, the A.B. Dick Company, as well as the some of the Ford family’s older personal papers. There are also substantial collections of papers belonging to Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers.

One of the cold storage areas keeps these (and many, many more) Edison phonograph cylinders carefully preserved.

In addition to business documents, there are boxes containing information about each of the homes in Greenfield Village; posters and and materials from various World’s Fairs; historic books, films and photographs; publications on the auto industry and racing; trade catalogs; advertisements, and some fascinating collections of artifacts relating to industry, domestic life, business, art and popular culture.

Items are carefully catalogued.

There were a few moments on the tour that I found myself overwhelmed with the vastness and diversity of the of the collections. I couldn’t help but think that some of my friends who love shows like American Pickers and Antiques Road Show would be in their glory.

The period clothing collection is often used for reference for costumers.

I was fascinated by the number of some of the items collected. For example, there are drawers and drawers of spectacles and eyeglass.

This is just one of the many drawers of eye glasses.

There are paintings, tools, original patent models, textiles, instruments, antique toys and decorative home accents.

Antique iron horses are just some of the toy items collected.

In addition to seeing only slightly older versions of items that are still pretty standard in many modern households – such as a baby monitor, a set of hot rollers and some Tupperware – I especially enjoyed the drawers dedicated to restaurant toys and themed lunch box sets.

Among the collections were themed lunch boxes and give-away restaurant toys.

According to Kathy, people who use the research center are car guys, researchers, movie makers, clothing and costume designers, historians, writers and, of course, the staff of The Henry Ford. Staff and volunteers at Benson Ford Research Center continue to diligently work on making the materials accessible through its online catalog and finding aids, the library World Cat system and by digitizing materials for easier sharing.

A designer gown once worn by Elizabeth Firestone.

And here’s something – a visit to the reading room at Benson Ford Research Center is free and open to the public, Tuesday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. There’s no appointment necessary, and there’s always someone there ready to help with visitors interested in viewing paper and photographic artifacts. If you want to see the other artifacts that are stored in there, you’ll have to take the tour like I did. (Specific artifacts can also be viewed by request through the center’s services.)

Oh, and a little post script … No – those of us on the tour did not walk all five miles of the place. However, we saw so much on the little jaunt we did take  but still only scratched the surface of the what’s behind the scenes at Benson Ford Research Center.

Benson Ford Research Center offers its Behind the Scenes Tour for $150 for groups of up to 15 people. There is a general tour as well as a tour on early photography. Contact them for more information.

Kristine Hass is writer and a long-time member of The Henry Ford. She frequently blogs about her family’s visits to America’s Greatest History Attraction.

This is part of a series of posts on preserving digital photographs: Honey, I deleted the kids.

An aspect of preservation that is often overlooked by the home user is find-ability.

We don’t want to go to all this trouble to preserve the images and then not be able to find them. This gets even more challenging as the number of digital photos we take and save continues to increase.

A beginning step is replacing the meaningless file names that are generated by most digital cameras. You can use something as simple as “2011HalloweenParty-1.jpeg,”  “2011HalloweenParty-2.jpeg,” etc.

The more information conveys in the file names, the better. Applying the same idea to the folders (directories) that you keep your photos in is good practice as well.

Here are some additional tips for file and folder naming:

• Use smart file names incorporating things such as dates, subjects, etc.
• Use smart folder structures
  1. Name the folders using dates, subjects, etc.
  2. You can start the name of the folder (or file) with numbers to keep them in the order you want.
  3. Do not use a lot of nested folders, as this can lead to confusion.
• Use a file structure that is as simple as possible and can be understood by others.

You can go beyond file and folder names by embedding additional metadata in the files themselves. Metadata is a fancy word meaning data about data.

The Henry Ford spends a lot of time creating good metadata so our users can find digital material. And a smart file name is part of that metadata. A good file name is some sort of description of that file.

Both JPEG and TIFF formats have the ability to embed additional descriptive information in individual image files. This information is often in the form of tags or keywords.

Perhaps you would like to add tags listing family members who appear in each image. This would allow you to find an image with the keyword “Timmy,” even though the file itself may be named “Thanksgiving2010.jpeg.” Many photo editing and viewing software options (including the free XnView) allow you to both add and search embedded tags.

Many home users rely photo management software or online solutions to manage digital photography. That’s great, but you should understand the limits of how your particular solution works when it comes to saving structure or keywords. For example, when you make keywords in the software, does it actually embed them in the file, or just store the tags in the software? If it just stores them in the software you could lose the ability to keep your tags if you ever move to a new solution.

I hope this information helps you make some informed choices when deciding how to save, store and find your family’s digital images. There is a lot more information out there on this topic. One of the first and best places to look is the Library of Congress’s Personal Archiving site. Most of all, don’t be intimidated, get busy and preserve those memories!

The other posts in this series are

Honey, I deleted the kids!

The digital master

File format compression

Which format?

Storage media and backups

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.

This is part of a series of posts on preserving digital photographs: Honey, I deleted the kids.

We have discussed what formats can be used to save these files, so where do you save them?

There are many different choices for storage of digital content, with hard drives, CDs, DVDs, flash drives and online storage sites being the most common. Each medium has its own advantages and disadvantages:

• Hard drives are easy to check and access, but also easy to accidently delete or overwrite and are susceptible to computer viruses.
• CDs are easy to use, relatively inexpensive and can be stored offsite. They consist of multiple layers, each one of which could be a failure point. Most enterprise digital preservation solutions are moving away from optical disks, but they can still be an important tool for those preserving digital treasures at home.
• Flash drives combine many of the advantages of both hard drives and CDs, but their portability can also lead to easy loss, and they can get expensive for large image collections.
• Online storage is a great option because it is by definition offsite and usually easy to access. But online storage can be expensive, can limit the types of files used, and what happens if the site goes out of business tomorrow?

While The Henry Ford stores and backups its files on enterprise servers and tapes, you – the home user – can create a great system of your own using the above storage media.

Here we can bring in two important concepts of professional digital preservation: the more copies (backups) of files the better, and the use of a combination of different storage solutions to mitigate risk.

Files on hard drives and backups on CDs and/or online mean that you are much more protected from failure than you are with just one copy, or multiple copies stored on the same medium. Here are some guidelines for managing your backups and storage media:

• At least one copy stored offsite is a great idea. These could be stored online, on CDs kept at your Aunt Tilly’s house (you should really visit her more often anyway), etc.
• Check your files at least once a year to make sure that they are still OK and the media is still working.
• All of these media options will fail at some point. Take a proactive approach and migrate your files to new media every five years, which will help prevent media obsolescence and bit rot.

Just remember that backing up your files just once will greatly increase the chances that your precious digital images will not be lost.

The other posts in this series are

Honey, I deleted the kids!

The digital master

File format compression

Which format?

Finding your files

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford. 

This is part of a series of posts on preserving digital photographs: Honey, I deleted the kids.

At The Henry Ford, we use different file formats depending on the application.

For our digital master files, we always encode images in the TIFF format. Even if the image file comes into the archive in a different format, we will convert it to a TIFF and save it in our restricted preservation area.

While this means that the files will be very large when compared to other formats, our network can handle the storage, and it is important for us to have the highest quality digital master possible.

We also make smaller and more portable copies of these files for access purposes. We save these derivatives as JPEGs. If something goes wrong with the JPEG files, we can always make new derivatives using our digital master.

The TIFF format makes for an ideal digital master. For the home user however, the size of these files might break the budget when buying hard drives, CDs, or online storage space – especially if you have many images.

If you find yourself in that situation, it is possible to use JPEGs as your digital master. If you choose to do this, use the lowest compression possible and, most importantly, never re-save your JPEG masters.

Always make a copy of the digital master, and make any edits to that copy. This copying and editing technique will ensure that you avoid the problem of digital generation loss.

Similar to what we do here at The Henry Ford, you will most likely use smaller, more highly compressed versions of your images for sharing or uploading.

Here is one possible way to utilize different file formats at home:

• TIFF files used as digital masters and stored on a hard drive for easy editing and access. TIFFs are great for this because of their immunity to digital generation loss.
• Low compressed JPEG files kept on CDs as backups. JPEG’s stored on CDs will be harder to access and re-save than when stored on hard disk, so digital generation loss should not be an issue.
• A smaller, more compressed JPEG version of the photo can be uploaded to Flickr or Facebook, emailed to Aunt Tilly, etc.

This is just an example, so please adapt what formats you use to best suit your situation.

If you want to learn more about file format compression (and who wouldn’t?), Wikipedia has good articles on data and image compression, and JPEG and TIFF file formats.

The other posts in this series are

Honey, I deleted the kids!

The digital master

File format compression

Storage media and backups

Finding your files

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.

This is part of a series of posts on preserving digital photographs: Honey, I deleted the kids.

One of the first thing you have to decide when preserving digital images is what file format you are going to save your digital master and derivatives.

Denoted by the file’s extension (the letters after the period in a file name, like .doc for files created by Microsoft Word), format determines

• how a file is encoded on your computer
• what programs can open or edit the file
• what type of compression is used on the file

For digital imaging, compression is one of the most important things to consider in deciding which file format suits your needs.

File compression can be a complicated topic. At its core, compression is the method of making a file as small as possible so you can fit more files on your computer’s memory and storage. File formats use different methods of compression that balance quality and size in different ways.

The very common JPEG file format (.jpg) uses a flavor of compression called lossy. That means when the file is saved it loses some data. To complicate matters further, it is possible to save a JPEG with different levels of compression. The more compression, the more data is lost, creating a smaller image with less quality. Also, this loss happens every time you edit or save the same JPEG file, which over time can significantly degrade an image (called digital generation loss).

At this point you may be asking yourself: “Why wouldn’t I just use the lowest form of compression all of the time?” The simple answer is file size. A JPEG saved at the lowest level of compression can be well over ten times the size of images saved at the highest level of compression. This kind of size difference can add up quickly when storing a large number of images.

Another common file format for digital images is the TIFF format. TIFF uses lossless compression, meaning, you guessed it, no data is lost when the file is created or saved. With lossless compression, initial quality loss and digital generation loss are not an issue.

However, like the JPEG example above, the type of compression has a significant impact on file size.

TIFF files can be significantly larger than the same image encoded as a JPEG. As an example, see the screenshot above compares two encodings of the same image of our 1949 Volkswagen Sedan.

Although both files are the same resolution, the JPEG is 220.95 KB while the TIFF comes in at 2.65 MB (2,713.60 KB), or over 12 times larger than the JPEG! As you can see, your decision on how to save your images will have real implications on how you use the file and how much you pay for storage.

The other posts in this series are

Honey, I deleted the kids!

The digital master

Which format?

Storage media and backups

Finding your files

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.

This is part of a series of posts on preserving digital photographs: Honey, I deleted the kids.

The concept of the digital master is an important one.

Basically, the digital master is the copy of the digital file that will receive the greatest level of preservation (in the digital preservation world, we sometimes call this file the preservation copy or preservation master).

When we scan a photo or receive a born-digital image at The Henry Ford, we put a high resolution copy of that digital file in a restricted area on our network where it is backed up and regularly checked. We will make copies of this image to place in our interactive stations on the museum floor or on our online collections page, but these images are usually smaller and are stored in less restricted places. We know that if the derivatives are lost or corrupted we can always make another copy from our digital master, which is safe, warm, and happy in our restricted network area.

The digital master is important to think about for home digital preservation as well.

Think of your digital master as the file from which all other files are made. Decisions regarding file formats and storage mediums will vary depending on whether the file in question is your digital master or a file you will be emailing to Aunt Tilly.

The digital master should be the highest quality possible, as all other copies you make of the file can only be of equal or lesser quality that the master file.

The other posts is this series are

Honey, I deleted the kids!

File format compression

Which format?

Storage media and backups

Finding your files

Lance Stuchell is the Digital Project Archivist at the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.