A Digital Souvenir: The 1900 Automobile Club 1,000 Mile Trial Main Menu A Digital Souvenir: The 1900 Automobile Club 1,000 Mile Trial Cover Page of Scalar Presentation Table of Contents Introduction Welcome! History of the First Trial Learn about the historical context surrounding the first ever 1,000 Mile Trial Participants Who were the people that undertook this historic event? Automobiles of the Early 20th Century Before cars were in wide use, they were a luxury status symbol at the turn of the 20th century. This section contains descriptions of some of the types of cars that ran in the original race in 1900. Motor Vehicles in the 1,000 Mile Trial of 1900 Motor vehicle model descriptions and information of the 1900 Trial. Photography Discover how the photographic image was developed in this time period as well as more insight about the photographer, Argent Archer. Mapping the Trial Check out some of the major stops along the route of the Trial Additional Resources For more information about the exhibit's topics and the 1,000 Mile Trial we have compiled resources here.

Technical Note

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This project was produced by Tori Cox, Russel Peterson, and Dana Reijerkerk as part of a master's level course in Digitization of Cultural Heritage Materials at the University of Michigan's School of Information.

The photographs used in this digital exhibit were originally situated within a souvenir photo album, with the words "Souvenir of Automobile Club 1,000 Mile Trial, 23rd April to 12th May, 1900" embossed on the front cover. Photos were attached to front-side of most pages with a few being on the back-side in instances where there was a panoramic shot. The cropped images that we included in our exhibit lost some of the materiality of the original work because we did not include the full image within the scrap book page. We wanted to allow a high resolution and quality image to have a zoom capability so we decided to edit out the scrap book page within all of our derivatives.

Below is one of our production master images from the photo album and also in our exhibit. In the far left of the image the binding of the scrap book can be seen as well as the size of the photograph in relation to the scrap book page. All photographs from the photo album were 11.25" x 9". Pages within the album were 14" x 10.37".



For the purposes of our project we used an Epson 11000XL Scanner to digitize our images. A device target was scanned at the beginning of each session to measure the scanner's capabilities in proportion to our desired technical specifications. In addition, each image was scanned with a 9-inch object target, which can be found in the top right-hand corner of the archival masters. We used Golden Thread analysis software, which was developed by the Image Science Associates (ISa), in combination with the object-level target to measure the digitization quality. The object target was measured the image quality with Golden Thread. Post-scan processing was done through various softwares, such as Golden Touch, IrfanView, Preview, and Photoshop. The images included on this site have been converted from TIFFs to JPEGs in order to fit the file size threshold of Scalar.

We based our technical specifications on the Technical Guidelines for the Still Image Digitization of Cultural Heritage Materials from the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) working group. Below are the specific FADGI standards and technical specifications that we intended our images to adhere to at the beginning of our project. Our team aimed to achieve 4-star quality digitization, and thus manipulated scanner settings to meet the standards defined for 4-star quality Prints and Photographs. We also used specifications from the Bound Volumes: Rare and Special Materials chart also found in FADGI. The tables below comes from the Guidelines. All of our images were scanned at 400ppi and 16-bit depth level. However, due to the capabilities of the scanner, portions of our image qualities (such as mean Delta E scores) were only able to meet 3-star standards.




Finally, our team created metadata for each of the images in the photo album. We based the elements we chose to include on the Library of Congress's Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). Records adhering to this schema can be written in XML and are easily machine readable to better allow for interoperability with other systems. Several elements, such as "topic" and city and country location names, adhere to authority vocabularies like the Getty's Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN).

A spreadsheet of our full metadata records can be viewed here: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SMOlXYfJttvcZ4b2-8as8DNcBO26yLibgopdz4o0kPA/edit?usp=sharing.

For further information links to MODS guidelines can be found embedded above as well as on the "Additional Resources" page.

In addition to these full records, we have crosswalked portions of our custom metadata schema to Dublin Core elements for images included on this site. Clicking on the "Details" tab below any of the images of the album photographs on this site will reveal all the metadata we have chosen to include here.

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