The General Artemas Ward House is filled with 18th- and 19th-century objects. The efforts of HCL Imaging Services has significantly improved access to the collection.

The General Artemas Ward House in Shrewsbury contains hundreds of 18th- and 19th-century artifacts: old-fashioned dresses and top hats, china and linens, parasols and playing cards, a sewing basket, butter churns, and much, much more. Originally owned by the commander of the patriot forces during the Battle of Bunker Hill, the house was given to Harvard in 1925, but has proven difficult to study since it lies 40 miles from Cambridge.

Now, HCL Imaging Services has significantly improved the collection’s accessibility by digitizing a large portion of the collection and making images of the house and 500 of its original objects available to Harvard professors, students, and anyone, in fact, with an Internet connection.

Collections such as those in the Ward House cannot fit on a library shelf, but are important to researchers. So HCL was well prepared when Harvard professors Laurel Ulrich and Ivan Gaskell, who have used the Ward House collections since 2005 in their co-taught History 1610 course, “Confronting Objects/Interpreting Culture,” proposed a digitization project that would benefit their course.

“Professors Ulrich and Gaskell saw that using digital technologies could be a way to really facilitate use of these materials in their classes,” said Maggie Hale, librarian for collections digitization, HCL Preservation and Imaging, who served as project manager.

The project required the dedicated attention of two photographers over summer 2007: David Remington, manager, and Julia Featheringill, assistant manager, in HCL’s Digital Imaging and Photography Group. The rooms alone took three weeks as Remington and Featheringill struggled to maneuver a small arsenal of cameras and lamps through the cramped 18th-century structure. To be thorough, they photographed every room from multiple angles.

“One of the reasons for capturing overall shots of the rooms was to compare them with earlier photographs and to see how the house museum of the early 20th century compared,” explained Hale, noting that for a time before the Ward House came to Harvard, it operated as a museum. “That is, in the early 21st century, how have they interpreted this room differently? Where is the furniture placed? What is the wallpaper like? This information can be used to study history but also used in museum studies.”

Working onsite came with other challenges as well. Remington and Featheringill often found themselves covering windows and moving furniture to make room for equipment, minimize distractions, and lessen glare. Consulting with Paula Lupton, Ward House collections manager, ensured that they restored each piece to its original spot. Fortunately, they were aided by technology. “We were shooting digitally, so we would confer over a lot of the shots,” said Remington. “The image would come up on a computer and an external monitor, so we could study it and fix problems. That was reassuring.”

Once images of the rooms had been captured, they faced the new challenge of photographing the smaller objects. “We pretty much built a custom studio outside in the woodshed—it was really a garage, with wood walls, a concrete floor, and lots of spiders,” said Featheringill.

Most items required multiple shots to capture the item from different angles or to show specifics, like labels, so that researchers later viewing the images online would be able to really study the details. The multiple shots, close-ups, and details are what will help make the objects so useful to scholars online—for instance in History 1610, where students need those details to research their chosen item, its maker, materials, and significance.

“Now that so many materials are available—objects as well as documents—I will be able to use these things in undergrad lecture courses and small seminars,” said Ulrich. “I will no doubt use them in my core course “Inventing New England” when I next teach it.”

Gaskell was careful to note that he will still want to take his students to the Ward House so they can see the original items and view the collection in context. Still, students should now be able to view the possibilities online before visiting the Ward House and afterward study their chosen objects online in their spare time. 

The Ward House may hold ordinary objects, but the abundance and totality of the collection—house, furnishings, manuscripts, photographs—make it extraordinary as well. It presents, all at the same time, an opportunity to study an important figure in the American Revolution, a 19th-century farm family, and a 20th-century museum.

HCL has made all but the room photos publicly available, and a finding aid describing the virtual digital collection will link to the various components—collection objects, family photos, and manuscripts—drawing them together and thus integrating the pieces.

View objects from the Ward House in VIA by visiting http://via.harvard.edu, choosing “General Artemas Ward House Museum” in the “Limit Repository to:” box, and entering “objects” in the “Search for:” box. To view photos of rooms, use the search term “interior views.”