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 nearly 100 years to 2012, where the staff of The Henry Ford and the Benson Ford Research Center are creating a modern assembly line to digitize the 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 Benson Ford Research Center (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.

In an effort to bring speed and efficiency improvements to imaging, the BFRC has adopted a process we refer to as Rapid Capture digitization. Used at a number of institutions across the country, including the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Beinecke Library, and the San Diego Air & Space Museum, Rapid Capture (RapCap) is part technology, part process, and part philosophy.

Technically, RapCap 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.

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 staff and visitors 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 even a camera phone, to take personal photographs recently, then you know how quickly you can take tens or even hundreds of snapshots. The same holds true for RapCap, with the limit on imaging rate being the safe and proper handling of the archival material, not the wait for the scanner to make a pass.

In some cases, we have been 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. Our RapCap workstation has been up and running since February 2011, and in that time we have produced over 9,000 images from some 2,000 objects.

Process, or efficiency in process, is also an important part of RapCap. For example, since material handling is one of the keys to the speed of RapCap, we are working 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:

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, RapCap is in some ways a philosophy. RapCap 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 RapCap images, which appear slightly tilted, such as this image from the Detroit Publishing Company collection:

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 rescanned 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 RapCap has, to this point, proven to be quite successful. We’ve created a large number of images that meet our goals for quality, usefulness, production time, and cost. For 2012 we are planning to increase the number of objects imaged to take further advantage of this relatively new capability.

And if you’re intrigued about RapCap and its use in libraries and archives, OCLC Research has produced a great report and companion webinar, “Rapid Capture in Special Collections and Archives.”

So how do we decide what we’re going to digitize next? That’s where you come in!

Take a look at (and start using!) our digital materials, either by visiting our Collections website or the kiosks located in our new Driving America exhibit. Then let us know: What types of images are you enjoying? Are the quality, amount and type of images you find working well for your needs? How useful is the information displayed with the images?

Your feedback can help us to improve our work, and most importantly, your experience here at The Henry Ford. Tell us in the comments below, or by reaching out directly to us at the BFRC – we want to hear from you!

Brian Wilson is the Digital Processing Archivist at The Henry Ford’s Benson Ford Research Center.

On the shortest day of the year, we’ll keep things short and sweet, and celebrate the first day of winter by showing Henry and Clara Ford having some cold-weather fun.

Here’s to a happy winter for everyone!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yivYDlB88_8]

Henry Ford ice skating (THF_HFS_V.200.FC.X.27)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUIlceNsZaw]

Clara Ford throws a snowball (THF_HFS_V.200.FC.X.22)

We’re excited to announce our newest collection on Flickr:  photobooth portraits, which joins our other historic photos on Flickr in giving new access to our deep photographic collections.   These photobooth shots  give insight into the use of photography in everyday life in the twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1970s.  The collection includes shots of Harvey Firestone, Jr. and Elizabeth Parke Firestone.*

We’re excited about these photos:  look for a post on the cultural history of the photobooth portrait, coming soon from Cynthia R. Miller, our Curator of Prints and Photographs–and the next time you’re at Henry Ford Museum, take a picture of your own in our photobooth near the IMAX entrance.

*The Henry Ford holds a great deal of Mrs. Firestone’s couture clothing, as well as the Columbiana, Ohio, farm where Harvey Firestone, Sr. was born, among other Firestone artifacts.

Historical Resources intern Christine Driscoll has written a series of guest posts on the 1929 questionnaire.

In the 19^th century, politics and campaigns were the focus of debate and discourse in small towns. Naturally, the election of 1860 was particularly exciting as the future of the Union seemed to hang in the balance. Those who saw Lincoln speak recalled feeling an instant connection. At the same time there was vicious contention – some did not believe Lincoln would even survive the election. As it turned out, Lincoln survived, but the Union did not.

Although the 1929 Historical Questionnaire did not explicitly inquire about the Civil War or life during the Civil War, it made an enormous impact on the children in the frontier of Michigan – financially and emotionally, as prices for food increased and fathers or brothers went to war and sometimes did not return. As children, their memories were shaped by what affected them. For instance, one woman recalled that only three days into the school term, the teacher quit to enlist in the Union Army.

The bulk of responses came from Midwestern states and consequently few responses contained any mention of slavery. Virginia Parsons was one of the few respondents born in the South, and her family moved to the North deliberately to leave the environment in which women and children were kidnapped and sold.

Mattie Ford Swope, whose family owned slaves, remembered some men deviously took advantage of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation:

When the Negroes were freed they were told that they must pay so much to obtain their freedom and I recall plainly how Northern men would set up a little office and how the negroes would line up even down the road to try to get a chance to purchase their freedom. My mother told our people that they need not pay, that Abraham Lincoln had issued the command that they be free. Those men may have been Southern men for all I know but of course we thought it could not be.

As we went through the questionnaires, we hoped to find a response from a person whose memory of slavery would be the most accurate – someone who was born a slave. As we neared the last box of responses, we were certain we wouldn’t find one until a man named Dave Williams began his response with “I was born a slave.”

His letter describes the same things as other children of the period –his childhood home, meals, games they played, and the chores he had. Unlike other children though, his chores were not the duty of a child helping his family, but forced manual labor for the plantation owner.

Most respondents were too young to participate in the Civil War and so only remember their fathers or uncles serving in the Union Army (anyone that wrote of the war and service came from the North). Mary Crook’s grandmother followed the news very carefully while her sons were in the service and held the opinion that “General McClellan ought to be shot.” Although young men were eager to sign up, it was a far more difficult decision for fathers, like Mary Crook’s, to leave their families and farms, especially on the frontier where the head of household was desperately needed. Dorothy Wait remembered her family’s solution.

Soldiers were formed into companies everywhere and we did not know how soon our home would be broken up. The men in our community, who were liable to draft, formed a pool and paid in fifty dollars each so in case they were drafted they could hire a substitute.

The respondents’ perspectives of the Civil War as it happened was limited by the news they could gather in their rural, agrarian towns. Few knew of slavery firsthand and even fewer saw any actual combat. Instead, the children from the west vividly remembered the altercations and conflicts that took place in their small spectator towns when Union Supporters and Southern Sympathizers clashed. Frank Barker witnessed a confrontation between two men at the general store when he was a small child:

An old “copperhead” came in and inquired for the letest [sic] news from the war front. The clerk had a brother in the ranks, and naturally was keen for all the news that could be gained, and replied to the questioner that the latest report was that the South had won a great victory with a heavy loss of life in the Union army. This was good news to the old copperhead and his reply was “good enough for them. If they want to go down there and fight for the wooleys, let them take what they get.” Instantly the clerk leaped over the counter and grabbed the old man by the beard with one hand, and held a cocked revolver in the other hand against his head, walked him to the door headed toward home, and told him, with a swift kick in his rear, “you toddle, look neither to the right or the left, and if ever I see you again I’ll shoot the life out of your worthless old carcus.”

Martin L. Armstrong remembered a Sexton threatening men who wanted to take down the Union Flag:

I remember during the Civil War, on going to church one morning a nice Flag was floating from the top of the church, some went to the Sexton to get him to take it down, his reply was, Gentlemen I would not give much for the life of a man that would attempt to take that Flag down.

The tension between those who believed the South should have been allowed to secede and those who believed in preserving the Union erupted again when Lincoln was assassinated. John McMillan Powers recalled going into the town of Battle Creek after it happened:

From the balcony of the Battle Creek House was hanging a rope, with a noose in it, and I was wondering what caused all these things and the crowd was still yelling and hollering. When the excitement quieted down we found a man who could tell us the cause of it, and he said: “That man in the grocery store, when the news of Lincoln’s murder came, says “I am glad of it, I am glad of it. He should have been killed long ago.” The crowd immediately got a cannon and put a blank cartridge and blew out the store door which he had locked up after he discovered the meaning of the words he had used.

Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became President and the process of Reconstruction, which aimed to build a new egalitarian South, was dismantled. Living in the North, few, if any, respondents noticed this change. It is only brought up in Dave Williams’ response to question 15, an open-ended question that asked the respondent to record what they wanted to pass on for posterity. Williams, who was born a slave, did not write about slavery but disenfranchisement:

After we were set free it was several year before we were allowed to vote, the white people said we had no right to vote and caused much trouble. Often negroes were turned back at the poles [sic], or persuaded to vote like the white man wantid [sic] them to vote.

The Civil War has been the subject of countless books, films, and other works of art, but these will always be secondary sources of information and far more comprehensive in their scope than the war was for most Americans. It’s interesting to read about the war from the perspective of someone who lived in the same town that you do, 150 years earlier. More than 100 men and women from all different kinds of backgrounds wrote about their memories of the Civil War in the Historical Questionnaire.