Historic photos debut online
NCR Archive: Available at DaytonHistory.org beginning Monday
DAYTON — The 12,000 previously unseen photographs from the NCR Archive that Dayton History will unveil Monday on its website are an “international treasure,” said Brady Kress, the organization’s president and chief executive.
The photographs date from 1885 to the mid-1960s, and range in subject from the 1913 Dayton flood to baseball legend Babe Ruth at an NCR Corp. sales office in Tokyo.
“It’s a rather remarkable collection,” said Paul Morman, a University of Dayton history professor who serves on Dayton History’s board.
NCR founder John Patterson “was one of the earliest to understand that photography could be very effective in getting the message across,” Morman said.
The historic images have been digitized to preserve them and make them available to an international online audience, Kress said. The project is part of a $1.25 million, five-year contract with NCR that also covers archive storage, staffing, insurance and exhibitions, he said.
The NCR Archive features about 1.3 million images, including some 100,000 glass-plate negatives and 70,000 magic lantern slides. About 250,000 images are of interest to a mass audience, Kress said.
“The goal by the end of 2011 is to have 20,000 to 25,000 finished,” he said.
The release of 12,000 images at once is rare for a nonprofit historical organization. “Those are major museum organization numbers,” Kress said.
The NCR images can be searched by key words and are available for purchase. “The money that is raised through this project goes directly into the endowment we have to continue telling stories about NCR and Dayton,” Kress said.
NCR Corp. founder John Patterson established a photography department early in his company’s history, said Paul Morman, a University of Dayton history professor who serves on Dayton History’s board.
“Because his salesmen eventually made their way throughout much of the world selling the cash register, there was a unique opportunity to pick up all sorts of images,” Morman said.
Patterson used the images “to develop the art of salesmanship,” as well as for educational purposes within the company itself, Morman said.
“We have probably one of the larger collections of unpublished photos of Hitler and his rise to power,” said Brady Kress, president and chief executive of Dayton History. NCR photographers captured the 1930s Nazi Party parades that went past the company’s factory in Berlin, he said.
Photographers from NCR’s San Francisco sales office documented the devastation after one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
“We have 100 to 150 images of the San Francisco earthquake, never published,” Kress said.
Those images are not yet available online, but will be digitized and added to Dayton History’s searchable database by the end of 2011, said Curt Dalton, Dayton History’s visual resource manager.
Dalton and a group of 10 to 16 volunteers have been scanning the images, which include glass-plate negatives and magic lantern slides, since October 2009.
Digitizing the collection has only become affordable in recent years because of the falling cost of technology, said Jeff Opt, Dayton History’s NCR archivist.
Dayton History will market the images to interior designers and building restoration companies, as well as historical researchers.
Photos purchased for research or personal use are $20; photos for public display are $95. The online images are watermarked to prevent unauthorized use.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2419 or dlarsen@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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