Museum preserves history with digital scanner

ST. MICHAELS — White gloves and intense focus are needed to run the new Danish scanner at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

Some of the museum’s oldest artifacts from the 1780s are run through the contactless machine. No liquids of any kind are allowed in the Norman and Ellen Plummer Center for Museum Collections to protect the invaluable documents.

In July, the museum got a world-class large-format scanner. It can make super high resolution images of mostly flat objects. It will be used to digitize not only the museum’s vast holdings of nautical information, but to support other organizations with their databases.

This includes materials that are challenging to handle and reproduce, including ship/sail plans, charts/maps, posters, artworks, framed items behind glass, rolled items and some three-dimensional artifacts.

Museum staff will work alongside volunteers to safely scan the materials, upload reference images to its online catalog of over 85,000 records and make them available to worldwide audiences.

As part of the project, the museum will provide free scanning services for other heritage tourism partners on special days, improving the availability and quality of graphic resources for exhibitions, publications and other historical projects.

The scanner is the HD Apeiron/42, made by Contex, designed in Denmark and first introduced in Europe. The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is one of the first sites to use this technology in the U.S.

It has five cameras inside of it and is much bigger than a standard 11-by-17-inch flatbed scanner.

There is a husband and wife team that is cataloging ships plans. AJ Daverede is a retired naval architect, and Heidi is an engineer. He spent 23 years as an archivist at the National Archives. There are tens of thousands of documents to be scanned in the museum’s collection, and they are volunteers.

“It is going to be great to get all this stuff online and give people access to it,” Heidi said, “to have good quality scans.”

Currently they are cataloguing Trumpy yachts that were built between 1910 and 1972. There are ship plans for these stately and sleek yachts.

Some of the drawings are torn or are in bad shape. So the advantage of digitizing is it minimizes handling.

Assistant curator Gabriella Cantelmo said that they look at digitization as a preservation method.

“If they get torn or crumble into dust, which is a possibility, we have them,” Cantelmo said.

“It is really important because part of our mission is access to Chesapeake-based culture and history. By digitizing these ship plans and making them available online or at request of researchers, we are furthering that access,” Cantelmo said.

She scanned a watercolor of “Wye Island Maryland” by Matthias Bordley, 1781. It showed a long-gone windmill on the island. The resolution is so high, you can look at a tiny portion of the art, and it is clear.

The museum was able to get this machine through a Maryland Heritage Area Authority grant.

“They want to know how we are serving the community. Not only with our collection, which serves the community, but also with this outreach. It is part of our stewardship responsibility and we take it very seriously,” said Jen Dolde, director of curatorial affairs and exhibitions.

You can see this work at collections.cbmm.org.