100 Years Of Ford History Is Now Available Online

Today is Ford's 119th anniversary, and to celebrate, the Blue Oval is making a century of its archival material available to the public online. This new website is called the Ford Heritage Vault, and you can spend hours reading, researching, or simply looking at photographs. It's Ford fanboy heaven, but online.

The Heritage Vault contains over 5,000 curated photographs and product brochures from Ford and Lincoln. The collection currently spans from Ford's founding in 1903 to its 100th anniversary in 2003. The collection will expand over time. Everything on there is downloadable for personal use and free of charge.

If you want a brochure to go with your 1968 Ford Torino, it's on there. In full color, ready to be downloaded and printed.

As you can imagine, curating this collection was an arduous task. Ford's archive team spent two years sifting through everything.

"We're opening up in a way we've never done before," said Ted Ryan, Ford archive and heritage brand manager. "Our archives were established 70 years ago, and for the first time, we're opening the vault for the public to see. This is just a first step for all that will come in the future."

So what exactly does Ford want to achieve? Many images highlight the functionality of Ford vehicles over the years, while others are just downright cool and meant to bring the brand's rich heritage to life. Younger fans can also delve into the website and learn about the brand.

A young Mustang Mach-E owner can trace the lineage of his car right to the beginning of the Mustang, launched in 1964.

"Complementing all of the vehicle photos available in the Ford Heritage Vault, brochures also add so much more information and impact for people who want to learn about our products, heritage, and accessories," said Ciera Casteel, processing archivist, who prepared materials for the Heritage Vault.

You might think this is only applicable to car nerds, but Ford worked with graduate students from Wayne State University's library and information science program in Detroit, as well as Ford employees and retirees, to pilot the Heritage Vault in advance of its launch. What they found is that the collection appealed to both casual browsers and hardcore gearheads.

Ford Heritage Vault has been created with accessibility features that translate photos, charts and graphs, and other pre-digital assets for compatibility with assistive technology now used by blind and visually impaired site visitors, such as screen readers, to interpret websites. Heritage Vault users can request remediated versions of additional brochures as needed.

"These assets were born analog, and we have worked hard to bring them to the digital world," said Casteel, who led the effort to make the assets accessible. "But digitizing isn't enough. It was important to us that the Heritage Vault is accessible for everyone to enjoy."

The images on this page are less than a percentage of the gold available in the Vault.