a baseline for the family archive

A reasonable first question in launching this digital archive project is, what do I want to archive? Guess what, there's not a simple answer. Herewith, a candidate list:

No-brainers (objects are already digital, already on computers somewhere, and have personal significance thus are worth saving)
- digital photos we've taken
- digital photos other people have sent us
- digital audio & video recordings we've made
- digital invites, cards and similar image creations I've made
- personal correspondence (e.g., word-processed letters)
- other personal creations (stories, poems, kid's homework etc)
- important documents (e.g., tax returns)
- personal websites
- this blog

Not sure part 1 (objects are already digital, already on computers somewhere, but have less personal significance)
- digital music collection (MP3s, AACs etc)
- email archives (mostly from work, but containing some personal material)
- work documents, especially creative output such as papers, websites, blogs, code
- household records (e.g., financial statements)

Not sure part 2 (objects are not in digital form, but could be scanned/captured, and have personal significance thus are worth saving)
- film-based photos/negatives we've taken
- family photo albums we've inherited
- personal audio & video on tape (audio cassette, Super8, VHS, Hi-8, miniDV etc)
- family trees/histories
- personal journals
- ephemera (letters, ticket stubs, souvenir programs, etc)
- important documents (birth certs, titles and deeds etc)

Probably not
- professional video content (movies on tape/DVD, recordings from TV)
- impersonal ephemera (bills, receipts, magazines, newspaper clippings etc)

Well, it's a pretty long list, and likely incomplete. Interesting that along the way I started to add things that were not about family stories and memories per se, like tax returns; in the long view, maybe these are valid parts of the story of my life. If you go to antique and estate auctions, you can sometimes find boxes of ephemera from the 1800's, old business records, journals and the like, which collectors value highly for the glimpses of daily life they offer.

I think maybe the physical artifacts should stay that way, and be preserved in their original forms. But it would be interesting in some cases to link them to related digital objects in order to tell a more illustrative and rich story. Hrm, so now I'm looking at not just archiving the media objects, but also linking them into some kind of ongoing story fabric? Preservation + presentation? I think the problem is getting harder...but maybe that's part of what is required here, that the objects in the archive exist in context. After all, a lot of my grandparents' pictures are of people, places and events that nobody recognizes -- without context they have lost their meaning.

Posted by Gene at January 29, 2004 12:21 AM | TrackBack