Posts Tagged ‘Client Stories: Microfilm Microfiche and Aperture Cards’
Digital Touchdown! Digitizing the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Microform Archive
This week marks the beginning of the National Football League’s 99th season. With preseason kicking off Thursday night in Canton, OH and the 2018 Pro Football Hall of Fame (HOF) Enshrinement Ceremony on Saturday, it’s just about the most wonderful time of year for football fans! To celebrate, we’re taking a look at a different kind of special team, The Crowley Company and the HOF, and the partnership that made the digitization of 1.1 million microfilm and microfiche football records a reality….
Raiders of the (Not So Lost) “Ark”ives: Digitizing Religious Archives
As I was preparing for Crowley’s appearance at this week’s annual American Theological Library Association Conference (ATLA), I realized that everything I know about religious archives comes from Indiana Jones’ movies and Dan Brown novels. It’s not a fact I’m proud of since religious entities have been a prominent market for Crowley (and as the daughter of a pastor and a church secretary, I’m no stranger to the goings on of the church) but my perception of their archives mostly…
The Marine and the Microfiche: Preserving 20 Years of Service
After one conversation with retired United States Marine Corps (USMC) Gunnery Sergeant Joseph Wilk, it was evident that his time in the military was filled with valuable life lessons and experiences. These experiences will be passed down for generations through his impressive storytelling skills (to which I bear witness), but also through the preservation of his military records from microfiche. This Veteran’s Day we take the time to shine a light on Wilk’s service and the journey to digitize his…
DAR, Darling: Digitizing Revolutionary Ladies
October is American Archives Month, a celebration of America’s history and the archivists, organizations and physical buildings that keep them safe and available to the world at large. Each week this month we’ll highlight a facet of how The Crowley Company partners with archivists and historians to help preserve and share American archives. In a previous blog, we detailed the factions of the National Society Daughters of the Revolution (NSDAR) and the many ways in which The Crowley Company has partnered to preserve…
Million Reel Inventory Complete: Microfilm Collections Assessed
In February, we blogged about the start of a massive microfilm assessment project undertaken by Crowley Imaging. Just six months later, on Friday, September 1st, the project has been successfully completed ahead of schedule and within budget. Here’s the story of the microfilm conversion. Crunching numbers Working as a subcontractor, Crowley Imaging employed seven staff under the direction of on-site project manager Larry DeMarchi to inventory more than 1.4 million reels of microfilm. The inventory included the contents of 126…
Massive Microfilm Inventory Underway
Crowley Imaging recently began a year-long project to inventory, barcode and inspect an archival collection of 75 years-worth of government microfilm records located in an underground mine in Pennsylvania. The inventory and inspection process will generate an accurate collection listing of over one million reels of microfilm along with a corresponding barcode database that describes 25 different characteristics of each film reel including the record name, years contained, film types and length of each roll. The resulting information will support…
Old Media in a New Age: Newspapers Go Digital in Latest Case Study
Newspapers have great significance in modern societies around the world. Their thin pages have distributed our world’s heaviest news – the sinking of the Titanic, Kennedy’s assassination, September 11th – and have also followed slightly lighter stories such as the discovery of Big Foot (originally reported in 1858 as “wild people”). Either way, newspapers have been and will continue to be a gateway into today and a crucial key to the past. From the humble origins of handwritten newsletters distributed…
Digitizing Presidential Collections for UVA Miller Center
The University of Virginia (UVA) Miller Center was recently awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize Presidential collections and make them available to the public online. Part of this grant provides the necessary funding to develop a website called Connecting Presidential Collections (CPC).[1] The CPC site is intended to become a central searchable repository for digitized Presidential collections. Already, the site hosts digitized images from over 80 collections. In addition to developing this site, the…
Donations Fund Newspaper Archive Scanning Project
Editor’s note: We love when blogs write themselves. In this case, credit goes to Eric Mease of the Historical Society of Cecil County and Maryland’s Cecil Whig, one of the country’s oldest newspapers, for an article published earlier this week. The article featured a newspaper digitization project for which Crowley Imaging performed the scanning. Microfilm images were digitized using the Mekel Technology MACH5 rollfilm scanner and the fragile bound newspapers were scanned using Zeutschel overhead scanners. The archived newspapers dated…
Celebrating Independence; Remembering the Revolution
As we celebrate Independence Day this week, we appreciate that the 4th of July is more than an excuse for a three-day weekend (although it’s a plus). It’s a chance to celebrate the day we declared ourselves a free nation. There are several organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of Colonial Wars and more who devote not just one day, but generations to memorializing the Revolutionary War and its role in shaping our country’s history. Crowley…