The photos are available for purchase, at prices from $79.99 to $109.99; they can also be printed directly off your computer, though not at the same quality. But this archive is not simply a moneymaking venture, Blau says.
It's also meant to drum up interest in life.com, an Internet venture between Life and Getty Images, scheduled to launch in February. The site will feature not only archive photos, but also up to 3,000 new images a day.
"It will predominantly be a contemporary photo site," Blau says.
For Crowley and his company, however, the focus is definitely on the past. The association with Life began about three years ago, when a third party brought the two firms together. Finding that Crowley had plenty of experience in archiving records - its clients have included the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Library of Virginia - Life contracted with the firm to scan about 10.5 million images.
"This is clearly our most high-profile project," says Pat Crowley, who now helps run the company that was founded in 1980 by his late father, Jerome. "Every day, you see something new and interesting."
The images (mostly negatives stored in envelopes, but including some paper prints as well) were stored in file cabinets, sitting in warehouses scattered throughout northern New Jersey and New York, Pat Crowley says. Representatives from Crowley go to the warehouses and load the images, file cabinets and all, onto trucks for the trip to Frederick. The trucks are climate-controlled to prevent any deterioration of the images.
At the end of each trip, the cabinets are unloaded into the firm's 20,000-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of Frederick. There, bar codes that had previously been placed on each envelope, part of an earlier cataloging, are scanned to ensure the contents match Life's records.
From there, the negatives are taken into a room for scanning, at the rate of about one every 30 seconds (about 14,000 a day), and loading into the computer. Because of the huge number of images involved, technicians only look to ensure the negatives are loaded into the scanner emulsion-side down. They don't worry about whether the images are upside-down or not.
That's left to the quality-control people, who view the scans on a computer, make sure they are aligned properly, attach an electronic watermark to prevent illegal duplication and type in whatever information is necessary - usually the subject, the photographer and when the picture was taken.
