The Digital Archive Group played a very important part in the preparation for Jim Beam’s 225th anniversary. The Beam family has had one goal for seven generations, making the best bourbon in the world. The first barrel of Old Jake Beam Sour Mash was sold in 1795, just three years after Kentucky became a state!
Historical assets from several office locations, including the main distillery in Clermont, Kentucky were personally driven to our digitization facility. Materials included advertisements, bottles, labels, slides, negatives, photographs, advertising ephemera, signage, and employee materials. Some of the photographs required preservation efforts as they had been subjected to water damage.
TDAG archivists cataloged, arranged and boxed the physical materials and preserved them in acid-free archival boxes. All materials were digitized at high- resolution with metadata embedded to images and printed materials converted to PDF’s with optical character recognition (OCR) applied. This large digitization effort laid the foundation for the Beam Suntory digital archive.
