Documenting Detroit

I wanted to share the exciting news that last week the Detroit Historical Society launched their new website. Everything went live, including the collection that I am currently digitizing.


The collection is called Documenting Detroit, which are hundreds of photographs taken by photography students in the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in the 70s and 80s. They took pictures of everything - statues and monuments, houses, storefronts, people, streets. Invaluable images of buildings and businesses that are no longer around today, and even some that are. 


Here are the following steps that another fellow and I completed along the journey:
1. All the images were accessioned but were out of order. Our first job was to find the images and put them in order in archival boxes.
2. Most of the images were too large to fit in the box. However, the photographs themselves were small, it was the board they were matted to that were large. So we spent the first 3 weeks with exact-o knives cutting the boards to scale so they would fit nicely in the boxes. Any info or accession numbers we trimmed off were re-written (and yes, our hands were sore!). 
3. To the scanners! We are currently using high-resolution scanners to scan the images onto the computers. Step 2 is to write in all the information into Past Perfect: the location, the date, the artist, a description, the size, the copyright information, the condition, relationships to other photographs, and finally we would attach a copy of our scan. 
4. After the record is created in Past Perfect, we have to add a "Detroit Historical Society" watermark using photoshop.
5. Final step - uploading it to the server so that it can display on the website. We use CyberDuck for this step.


We are nowhere near being finished, but here is what some of the final product looks like. Some of the images are still missing watermarks but will have them shortly. 


Ta Da! : Documenting Detroit Collection


Thanks for reading!