Slide Digitization
With assistance from Amazon Web Services and Digital Divide Data, an AWS partner company, the White House Historical Association has been able to digitize nearly 20,000 35mm film slides covering the White House from 1962 through the mid-1980s.
Gallery
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This photograph is of Nash Castro, the National Parks Service Liaison to the White House and one of the original members of the White House Historical Association, and two other Association staff members, at a table in the East Wing selling the first edition of "The White House: An Historic Guide" to visitors during a White House tour in July 1962. Created as part of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedys mission to make the White House a living museum, the guidebook was designed to be a memento for visitors to take with them following a visit to the Executive Mansion.
White House Historical Association -
In this photograph President Lyndon B. Johnson and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson await Indian prime minister Indira Ghandi at an arrival ceremony held in Gandhi's honor on March 28, 1966 on the South Lawn of the White House Grounds. Gandhi's limousine can be seen arriving. Also in attendance at the ceremony was Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
White House Historical Association -
This photograph by Joseph J. Scherschel shows astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White and their families in the White House swimming pool. The McDivitt family is out of frame. They were invited to the White House following the successful Gemini 4 mission to space, which included 62 Earth orbits over four days and the first American spacewalk. The invitation followed their promotion by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the rank of lieutenant colonel the week before at an event at NASA's Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas, and the visit included an overnight stay at the White House. This pool was installed during the Franklin Roosevelt administration and was covered over during the Richard M. Nixon administration to create the Press Room.
White House Historical Association -
This photograph is from the event announcing the Head Start program. In the photo a group of people hold the banner for the program. Left to right: film and television star Danny Kaye; First Lady Lady Bird Johnson; Lou Maginn, director of a Head Start project in Vermont; and Sargent Shriver, who spearheaded the program as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Two of Shriver's young sons, Timothy and Robert, are seen on the left, helping with the banner presentation. Head Start is a child development program designed to meet the needs of disadvantaged preschool children. It was a key element of President Lyndon B. Johnson's legislative War on Poverty. Mrs. Johnson championed the program.
White House Historical Association
The White House Historical Association was founded in 1962 to support the National Park Service in the preservation of the Executive Mansion. Part of WHHA's mission is to educate the public with regard to the history of the White House. To that end, WHHA published the first edition of its signature book, "The White House: An Historic Guide" that same year.
More publications followed the guidebook, and WHHA worked with photographers from National Geographic Society for decades to take pictures of major events and day-to-day life in the White House. Those images were preserved on 35mm slide film. The slides were placed in cold storage and remained there for more than two decades until the launch of the new WHHA Digital Library in 2016.
The Library team advocated heavily for getting the slides digitized in their entirety and, thanks to an agreement between WHHA and Amazon Web Services signed in 2016, the large-scale digitization project was begun in March of 2017. Working with Creekside Digital in Glen Arm, Maryland, WHHA prepared and delivered over 11,000 slides in the initial batch for scanning in the middle of 2017.
Many of the images in the slides had never been available to the public until the scanning process was completed. Special finds among the slides include photographs of that first edition of "The White House: An Historic Guide" on sale in the East Wing of the White House in 1962, Mrs. Kennedy hosting a concert for youth in the East Room (possibly the only color photos of that event), Indira Ghandi's state visit, Gemini astronauts and their families playing in the White House pool, and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson launching the Head Start program.
