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Working under one of the Frederick company's largest contracts to date, workers at the Crowley Co. have been diligently scanning thousands of images from Life magazine photographers for Google's new image sharing feature.

Many of the photos of icons such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bette Davis were not published in the magazine and are on public view for the first time. Other images, such as pictures of Marilyn Monroe, are versions of photos that have become icons themselves, said vice president Patrick Crowley. Some images date to the 1750s.

Life magazine and Google partnered to open Life's massive archive of historic photos to the public. Viewers can search by key word, people, place or event and can purchase framed reprints. Life, no longer published as a magazine, is now owned by Time Inc.

Crowley workers have been scanning rare images of celebrities such as Clark Gable and musicians such as Louis Armstrong for more than two years, but Google announced the project only in November and soon thereafter opened the image sharing vault. Under Google's "images" tab, the Life magazine archive is front and center.

Google then announced Dec. 9 that it would embark on similar endeavors through its book search feature with magazines including Ebony, New York Magazine and Popular Mechanics.

"We think that bringing more magazines online is one more important step toward our long-standing goal of providing access to all the world's information," wrote Google software engineer Dave Fousler on the official Google blog.

With more than 7 million images scanned, The Crowley Co. is more than halfway through its contract for 10.5 million Life images, said Crowley, who declined to discuss financial details of the project. While the company has handled workloads of similar or larger image collections, the Life project required unique streamlining to organize the files.

"We had six months to ramp up and prepare as the negotiations wrapped up," Crowley said. "Volume wasn't the issue, but there were some unique challenges."

Incorporated in Frederick in 1981, company purchased two manufacturing locations in San Dimas and Compton, Calif., in 1993, when it had 30 employees. Now, with about 100 workers, the family-owned company has noted continued growth and has tripled its size in the past five years, Crowley said.

The firm provides a variety of digital document and film conversion services and is also a manufacturer of high-speed microfilm, microfiche and aperture card scanners and other film equipment, which it services.

Its other major current projects include a long-term contract with the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which has obtained microfiche collections from around Europe and uses the images in its public resource center. The Virginia Library has also tapped Crowley to scan its fragile, historical documents from courthouses dating to the 1800s.