The Third Michigan Cavalry Civil War Picture Album, located at the Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical Collection consists of 74 carte de visite photographs taken between 1861 and 1864. Digital reproductions of all photographs have been made. Carte de visite (or visiting card) photographs were used from 1860 to 1890. The cards were sized 4 1/4 inches high by 2 1/2 inches wide.
The digitization (scanning and metadata entry) took place at the DPL Digital Lab.
In 2005, Wayne State University's Library & Information Science Program was awarded the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) "Recruiting and Educating Librarians for the 21st Century" grant. This funding aimed to recruit and train librarians, with theory and practical internships at local institutions, in the field of digital librarianship. Digital cohort student Anna Fast was placed at DPL for one term where she was supervised by Cheri Gay, Librarian III. The collection was digitized and the website built based on the website design developed by fellow digital cohort students Mignon Camara, Akilah Wood and Cassandra James.
Images were scanned with an Epson Expression 1680 scanner using Adobe Photoshop 9.0.1 CS2 at a 600 dpi resolution, 24-bit color, and saved as unaltered TIFFs. For public access, JPEG files were resized to 600 pixels on the long edge and saved at 72 dpi.
The Dublin Core format was used for metadata, and all subject headings are compliant with the OCLC authority file or AACRII rules. The Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials was used for form and genre headings. Metadata entry was done in Hyperion, the digital management database of Sirsi-Dynix.