From the NFL to Maine, a Bangor native’s company gives history a future
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — It was bad news, but Kristen Gwinn-Becker had to tell them.
One of her newest clients, the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, had just digitized 24,000 photographic slides from its archives.
“I told them they had to do it all over again,” Gwinn-Becker said.
They had scanned the images without capturing the plastic slide mounts, which had important caption and date information written on them. Without tagging the digital files with those details, they would be impossible to find again and wind up lost forever in a database abyss.
Digitally preserving and then finding venerable, old pictures, documents and artifacts, such as the Panther’s pictures, is Gwinn-Becker’s business as founding CEO of HistoryIT. The Bangor native founded the high-tech and history-minded company 13 years ago in Chicago before moving it home to Maine in 2014.
History IT Chief Technology Officer Donny Lowe (left) and founder and Chief Executive Officer Kristen Gwinn-Becker stand in their company’s foyer in South Portland on Sept. 20. Using proprietary software and preservation specialists, the company helps organizations digitize, catalog and then retrieve their historical assets. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
With the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still keeping many people out of offices and in front of their computers at home, the need for remote access to historic databases has only grown in the past few years, boosting Gwinn-Becker’s business in a big way. HistoryIT said her company now has about 300 clients and 36 full-time employees.
HistoryIT first helps its clients draw up master plans for preserving their historical assets. The company then digitizes all the physical items involved. When that’s done, HistoryIT then provides proprietary software for storing and finding the items again based on common sense search terms and groupings.
The company’s client list includes the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the University of Indianapolis, along with several national fraternities and sororities. In Maine, HistoryIT serves the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, as well as the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies at the Maine College of Art.
HistoryIT’s mix of old things and new technologies is a natural fit for Gwinn-Becker.
After graduating from Bangor High School in 1994, she finished her University of Maine bachelor’s degree in history at 19. Gwinn-Becker then went to work as a software engineer and developer in San Francisco and Boston while earning a doctorate in history.
With her unique background in both high tech and history, Gwinn-Becker then began to consult with organizations and businesses about how to digitize and preserve historic collections. In Like the Panthers, she found that most were doing it wrong.
Organizations would have their documents stored on single harddrives, inaccessible to anyone not hooked directly up to it. They would have documents preserved in non-searchable formats, including photo files. So she decided to start her own company and develop her own software, making sure she would have control over the preservation from storage to retrieval.
Today, HistoryIT’s main office sits in a nondescript South Portland office park. A small, attached warehouse is stuffed full of client materials waiting to be photographed, tagged and cataloged. In a darkened room, several employees go through the boxes of documents and pictures, photographing each one on specially-lighted copy stands.
They use cameras instead of scanners. Doing so is more time efficient and the results are better.
“Around here, scanner is a four-letter word,” Gwinn-Becker said.
With the imaging complete, other employees then enter the items into custom-planned databases, tagging content with search terms designed to be accessible by each individual client’s users.
“What does their normal language look like?” she said, describing her clients. “The tags are meant to expand that accessibility.”
Digital preservation photographer Maria Vargas processes an old photograph at History IT in South Portland on Sept. 20. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Maintaining that level of access is key, Libby Bischof, executive director of the Osher library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at USM, said. The library digitizes and tags its own collections but uses HistoryIT’s software to manage online access to its holdings.
“We have 90,000 searchable images online and maintaining democratic access to them all is key,” Bischof said. “It’s everything.”
With increasing numbers of people doing research and work from home, Gwinn-Becker expected demands for HistoryIT’s services to keep going in the future.
“Any organization older than five minutes needs access to their history in order to tell their story,” she said. “We’re trying to give that history a future.”