When treasures are worth preserving

William Hamilton

04/04/2009

The business plan developed by Edward and Diana Coderre was simple enough:
Launch a digital-archiving company that would cater mostly to preservation groups that needed to record one-of-a-kind documents, photos and artwork so they could be viewed without the risk of damage, or before they were lost to the ravages of time.
But a flaw in the couple’s idea quickly became apparent. Few organizations were willing to entrust priceless historical items to an unproven firm.
“Building the trust within the preservation community was one of the difficult things to do,” said Edward Coderre, president of The Digital Ark Corp., the Newport company the Coderres started in 2005.
Four years later, The Digital Ark is now armed with a reference list that silences even the most serious doubters.
The company has digitized everything from tens of thousands of historic slides, negatives and glass plates of steamships to 17th-century paintings to a fragile medieval Bible, painstakingly taking digital photos of each page.
In the spring, the Digital Ark is due to archive thousands of images of the Spanish Civil War from the late 1930s.
More groups are seeing the importance of digitizing their collections, particularly of photographic prints and negatives, according to Coderre.
“The lifespan of photography and film is about 75 years and since photography started to really come into use about 100 years ago, there’s kind of an urgency to digitize assets or lose them,” he said.
Now the business is more than just a digital-archiving company. The Digital Ark offers an e-commerce component to organizations, designing online databases in which the public can peruse items and purchase copies.
For groups that decide to take advantage of the e-commerce software, the Digital Ark discounts archiving fees in exchange for a cut of the revenue from purchases.
And it doesn’t end there. The Digital Ark has the capability to create other products, such as coffee table books, or frame archival exhibits.
Coderre says many of his clients have used the revenue streams as a method of funding further archiving efforts.
The Digital Ark did face trust issues when it approached preservation groups at first, but the Coderres weren’t exactly new to the technology when they founded the Digital Ark. Edward Coderre, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, worked in media design for several years in California, at one point operating his own firm in San Francisco.
In 1990, he was involved with an early effort to digitally preserve the Yosemite Photographic Survey, but the technology was slow and expensive.
When digital technology and cameras became faster and more affordable several years ago, Coderre thought a digital-preservation business could be viable.
The Coderres decided to move back to the East Coast – the cost of living in San Francisco was too high – and they selected Newport because of the cluster of preservation groups in the area, all of them potential clients. They came up with the business name as a play on Noah’s Ark, “making two of everything so that nothing gets lost along the way,” Diana Coderre said.
The company’s first job was digitizing 1,500 historical images for the Museum of Yachting, and then the Coderres worked for the Redwood Library & Athenaeum, archiving some of its special collections.
The hesitancy among preservation groups wasn’t only a matter of trust.
The librarian at the Redwood “was anti-computer,” Edward Coderre recalled. “But by the end of the project, she was one of our biggest supporters. She could see the importance of what we were doing.”
In most cases now, Coderre says, the biggest question for organizations now is how they are going to pay for it.
Grant money is more difficult to obtain of late, and the grant-writing process isn’t easy for The Digital Ark, either. The company often has to wait more than a year for funding to be approved, if the approval comes at all.
The company recently digitized nearly 40,000 images for the Steamship Historical Society of America, based in East Providence, and is preparing to start on another 20,000 images.
The company has also begun forming e-books, searchable documents created from digital images.
In the four years since founding the business, the Coderres have been kept busy with work within the state. They plan on changing that eventually. “As our reputation expands, we’ll definitely be taking on more work outside of Rhode Island,” Edward Coderre said. •

COMPANY PROFILE
The Digital Ark Corp.
OWNERS: Edward Coderre, president; Diana Coderre, vice president
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Digital archiving
LOCATION: 144 Spring St., Ne

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