Bridging Documentation, Restoration and Presentation

     As an intern with no task specifically assigned, I have been able to float around Direct Dimensions a bit and see a few of the distinct departments that the company has and get a good idea of what each one does. I started out in the cultural heritage/art preservation area and spent a good amount of time with the project management head there. He was able to walk me through a few of their client interactions from inception to completion, and the breadth of what they do here is genuinely impressive. One of the projects I was lucky enough to get a peek into involved working with the Central Park Conservatory to document, preserve and rehabilitate historic stonework and art installations including the Bethesda Terrace and the hippos in the Safari Playground. The Bethesda Terrace work mostly consisted of extensive scanning for documentation, but the hippo project consisted of scanning the sculptures for the explicit purpose of restoration and extended into the fabrication of exact replicas of hippo sculptures that were found to be in especially poor condition. The amount of work that this entailed was extensive but the end result is absolutely worth it, and now the hippo sculptures can continue to add to the makeup and personality of the park.

    A project in the architectural division involved documenting a historical building in Anne Arundel County that was due to be demolished for reasons related to safety, as the building was vacant for a number of years and contained high amounts of asbestos and other harmful materials. The deliverable here was a bit nebulous, as the client wanted the building documented but did not have a specific use in mind for the 3D data that was obtained. Management was brainstorming things to do with the data that could add value to the final product and brought me into the conversation, where I was able to think about it a bit and see that the package that they give to clients at the end of a project contained all of the raw data gathered, as well as specific formats of 3D models based on what purpose they would be used for. I realized the presentational aspect was entirely absent, aside from a SketchFab link that would display the 3D model so you can interact with it. This isn’t nothing, but I felt that it stripped the context entirely and thought I might play around and see what I could come up with to bridge that gap. Over the last month and a half, I was able to put together a basic platform for the company to host and display their 3D data in a way that better suites their needs, while keeping that data entirely under their control. I concentrated on the context aspect, adding the ability to display extensive archival-grade metadata, annotations, and data overlays (like drone flight paths) as well as many other features that cover their wide array of work. It has been an incredibly fun experience and I have learned an absolute ton about displaying 3D data on the web, as well as what they have taught me about the data capture process. My hope is that this project can evolve into something more comprehensive and be a genuine addition to their offerings long-term.

    Below is a screenshot of a scan they did of the National Katyń Memorial in Baltimore City presented in the web viewer I assembled. I did research and included the history of the memorial, the history of the massacre that the memorial is dedicated to the victims of, as well as the history of the scan that was performed. Direct Dimensions was contracted by the National Katyń Memorial Foundation to scan the memorial and do area calculations of the bronze and gold leaf materials for cost estimation purposes for repair and preservation. For this project the 3D model was more of a side effect than anything else, but we were able to create interactive documentation that the foundation can use to raise awareness for the memorial and preserve the memorial as it is right now for future generations, with full historical context present.

 

Stories in Storage

Photo: The exterior of the Howard County Center for African American Culture building

    Last semester, fall of 2025, I was hired along with two other students for an intern position with the Howard County Center for African American Culture. The hiring process was long, but not complicated. I was initially denied the internship, but they reached out to me about a month and a half later and asked if they could interview me to see if I could join the team. It ended up being less of an interview and more of a meeting to ask me when I could start. 

There wasn't much information about what the internship would have me do except for the position description in the initial email. All it said was that there had been a flood in 2021 that meant they needed to rapidly remove the museum's collections out of the building, and that now they were looking to recatalogue everything. I would be taught how to handle, record, and catalogue museum collections, which was the exact area of museum studies that I was interested in learning more about. After the interview, I joined the other two interns for an onboarding meeting and found out that the work hadn't started yet. We met once in November to become acquainted with the museum space and learn more about the center, and then once in December to start learning the hands-on skills before the holidays. I learned quickly that since the center was largely run by volunteers, everything took a little longer than usual to get started. 

The Howard County Center for African American Culture has an abundance of fascinating artifacts, books, documents, music, and more, a large portion of which sat unorganized in their upstairs storage closets. My internship supervisor, Dr. Kyla Cools, introduced us to the space, the artifacts, accession numbers, and Past Perfect, the museum collection software that we would be using to record all of the items. In January, after winter break, we all returned to the center to begin working consistently. 

 

History in Three Dimensions

Jake Marino

 

 Photo: Direct Dimensions employee using LiDAR to capture the Three Soldiers Vietnam war memorial statue in Washington, D.C.

    This semester I am lucky enough to be interning at a company called Direct Dimensions located in Owings Mills, MD. The company was started by the owner Michael Raphael in the mid-1990s as a metrology company that specialized in digitizing measurements of real-world objects for use in applications like CAD software, and over the years they became one of the premiere companies in the field of 3D scanning. The level of capture they can process is measured in microns at the most advanced level, and they use this skillset for everything from capturing for visual reference to capturing for exact replication and restoration. They have departments focused on specific types of capture, but my position is in the cultural heritage section of the company that works with artwork and historical artifacts and places. They are known very well in this domain due to their high level of technical expertise, doing scanning work for the National Parks Service, the Smithsonian and many other museums all over the country to preserve significant artifacts and aid in restoration as well as digitize items for public display on the internet and information kiosks in the museums themselves.

    My position initially was working on messaging in the cultural heritage space. This came about in a conversation I had during my interview where I talked about how important I thought the work they do is, and over the course of the meeting I laid out some ideas I had regarding working with museums and online institutions like Wikipedia to make scans of important cultural items more accessible. I am still doing that work but the company is inherently technical, so they have allowed me to do some exploratory work on that side as well. I have been able to see what they do for their process, from scanning and taking pictures, to processing of the raw data, to creating and cleaning up models, to presentation and even fabrication. It is incredibly interesting and overall, just super cool from every direction. I’m excited to see what I get to work on and to just be in this space as a preservationist, it’s a great opportunity in a field that most people probably don’t really think about but has very wide applications and huge future potential.