Ford Opens A Century Of Media Offering 5,000 Photos And Brochures From Its Past
2 min readFor the initial time, associates of the common general public will be ready to glance by means of marketing materials, photographs, and all varieties of other historical goodies from the history of a person of America’s most important automakers many thanks to the online Ford Heritage Vault.
“We’re opening up in a way we’ve in no way performed in advance of,” said Ted Ryan, Ford archive and heritage manufacturer supervisor. “Our archives were being established 70 a long time in the past, and for the initially time, we’re opening the vault for the general public to see. This is just a first stage for all that will come in the potential.”
Opened up to celebrate the 119th anniversary of the brand, the vault includes extra than 5,000 curated images and products brochures from Ford and Lincoln. Provided on the web site are images dating all the way back again to 1903, when the firm was launched, right up until 2003, when it celebrated its centenary.
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Ford’s archive team spent the very last two yrs cautiously curating the assortment. Digitized in high-resolution pictures, the contents of the vault are as a lot a reminder of the Ford automobiles they target on as they are a relic of the time they had been produced in.
A single established of brochures for the 1961 Ford Falcon characteristics not only data on the auto and its variants but normal commentary from Charlie Brown as very well. A brochure for the 1976 Ford Courier Personalized, meanwhile, displays the several wild paint schemes and customization offerings available to mini-truck enthusiasts at the time.
Ford labored with its current and former employees, as effectively as pupils from the Wayne State University’s library and details science method in Detroit, to pilot the Heritage Vault ahead of its start. It has also been made with accessibility capabilities to make photos, charts, graphs, and other pre-digital assets appropriate with assistive technologies applied by visually impaired web site website visitors, this kind of as display screen audience.
“These assets had been born analog, and we have worked tricky to provide them to the digital world,” stated Ciera Casteel, processing archivist, who led the cost to make the materials accessible. “But digitizing isn’t more than enough. It was crucial to us that the Heritage Vault is obtainable for all people to take pleasure in.”
