Martin Luther King Jr. – The King Center in Atlanta, GA, where technology and history come together to share the story of civil rights in America
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As the 83rd anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday approaches, The King Center in Atlanta has partnered with JPMorgan Chase, with the help of Hasselblad technology and Scott Geffert of imagingetc, to digitize over one million of the Center’s paper documents. This project was one of Martin Luther King III’s first initiatives after he took office as both president and CEO; both his father and his mother, Coretta Scott King, had been saving papers since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and now these important documents will become easily accessible to the entire world.
The archive includes documents not just from Dr. King himself, but also from other prominent figures in the Civil Rights Movement. Rough drafts of speeches, correspondence between leaders, and personal notes—often in Dr. King’s own hand—have all been preserved. Since the inception of The King Center Imaging Project, these documents have been archived at the Center. Visitors could make an appointment to view the documents, and they had to know which specific document to ask for. Post-imaging project, anyone with Internet access will be able to browse the entire archive for free from anywhere, at any time.
“It’s not just looking at the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech or the Letter from Birmingham Jail. We’re curating and organizing the documents in such a way that you’ll be brought so much more deeply into the Civil Rights Movement in order to get a broad understanding,” stated Ali Marano, head of the Technology for Social Good program at JPMorgan Chase. The partnership between The King Center and the Technology for Social Good program was the key to getting this project off the ground.
The end result of the project is free access to the documents for the purpose of education for the community. Dr. King was a community builder whose goal was to bring people together to educate on nonviolence, and this project will help achieve that goal.
“It’s opening this up to people all over the world, and Dr. King’s fans and followers are everywhere,” said Marano.
Scott Geffert, the expert in charge of the digitization aspects of the project, agrees: “I think that specifically with The King Center but also with any cultural heritage there’s so much to be learned from the past, but unfortunately, people have been unable to access vast collections of cultural heritage materials aside from physically visiting the site as a researcher.” Geffert explained that one interesting aspect that will be included in the digital archive is the reason Dr. King wrote the speech—the context it was written in, who he conferred with, and what the revisions were. “That’s what’s in this archive: the story behind the story,” Geffert said.
The accuracy of the digital representations of these papers is paramount to everyone involved in this project. “With us, these documents are not just any documents. They are pieces of art and we wanted to treat them as such,” Marano explained. “Their age, significance, authors—we wanted to make sure we were taking the best possible images of these documents.”
When it came time to develop the digitization process, JPMorgan Chase sought the best in the field. This is where Geffert came in, with twenty eight-plus years of cultural heritage and digital imaging experience already under his belt. Geffert said of his involvement, “To me, the value of doing it right and treating a piece of paper the same way you would a famous painting is the digital content needs to be trustworthy … We need cultural heritage to be believable and authoritative.” Mark Duhaime, Marketing Director of Hasselblad USA, is impressed with Geffert’s contribution. “When we get to projects like this with non-standard workflows that require specialization, there aren’t many people like Scott out there who are experts, so we’re very lucky to be working with someone who understands our technology, and beyond that is an expert in the workflow,” said Duhaime.
Geffert chose Hasselblad cameras based solely on the performance of their products. “When you get into objective capture standards, you peel away the marketing and get to the core of if a product works or not,” Geffert said of his decision-making process when faced with choosing what technology to use. “Hasselblad passed that muster. It’s nice to say that it’s not emotional.” There had been discussion of using scanners, but Geffert had already established that this system would work. “It allowed me to focus on the new challenges, and I didn’t have to struggle over the camera technology,” he said.
The technology currently being used to digitize the King Center’s documents is based on the Hasselblad H4D50MS camera systems. Duhaime explains, “We’re one of the only manufacturers that can provide the technology they need for this application.” Multi-shot is a technology that allows multiple exposures to create one image, creating a more accurate reproduction of what’s being shot. “They use anywhere from four to 16 shots to capture one image,” said Duhaime. “It’s a technology deployed for still-life photography that works perfectly for what they’re trying to do.”
When he was first given the project, Geffert, an active member of the ISO standards body, took a completely standards-based approach to the image capturing. Currently, there are imaging protocols in place that all cultural heritage projects must strive to meet. These objective measures of quality include DPI, color, sharpness, distortion, evenness of light, and tonality. The standards-based workflow is such that each camera being used at The King Center is checked every single morning to ensure that these guidelines are met and the images created are thusly of the highest quality.
“One of the interesting things about this project was the aggressive schedule that they had to this work,” Geffert said. “It was quite a fast turnaround between the first conversation and the goal of getting the lab up and running.” Geffert and his team were able to implement a system based on the imaging standards that allowed for the staff to successfully get through this massive volume of work without sacrificing quality. “Getting to the point where you can get through that volume and maintain quality and consistency, that’s the key to the whole thing,” Duhaime said.
Once the technology was in place and the system was worked out, the next challenge was getting the documents appropriately indexed and profiled. “We want to make sure that if someone gets on the site and does a search they get meaningful results returned to them,” Marano explained.
The actual imaging has been quick in comparison to the work involved with this part of the process—someone has to read the document, write an abstract, and choose the appropriate tags, among other steps. The staff of The King Center Imaging Project is made up of college students and military veterans. Geffert said of the staff, “You can imagine a military person and a college student to be potentially incompatible, but this project has brought these people together and everyone has grown as a team as well as individually. I know I have learned a great deal about team building as well.”
Seamless collaboration appears to be the theme of this entire project: three seemingly unrelated companies (large banking company JPMorgan Chase, large photography company Hasselblad, and small imaging company imagingetc) are all working together to meet their shared goals.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, so many people focused on doing the right thing,” Geffert explained. “It’s very real, and that’s what has made this so special, and that’s what comes across when you spend time at The King Center—the level of excitement, how eager they are to share this collection with the world.”
Duhaime agrees with Geffert. “For us, it’s nice to see projects like this happening today, with a company like JPMorgan Chase seeing the importance of this project and seeing it all the way through to implementation,” he said. “It’s really impressive for a company like that to take it to this micro level.”
The documents will be digitized and available to the public on Martin Luther King Day – January 16, 2012.
