Archiving Your Heritage
(Page 1 of 3)Author: Jesse Honn
Publication Date: 02/12/2007
As you explore your family heritage through research, books, audio, video, and talking with family and friends, you may find that the stacks of paper, photos, and other media begin to grow. These important research findings most likely took significant time and effort to compile, and it is a good idea to develop an organization and archiving plan now, during the early stages of family heritage exploration. Any original sources (such as original photos, documents, audio recordings, etc.) should be treated with care.
How does one begin the process of archiving and organizing all of this information? My first suggestion is to use a computer. Converting physical media into digital formats gives you many options for archiving and organizing this information. Computers today can store huge amounts of photos, audio, video, and text on a single hard drive. From there, the data can be perfectly copied to backup devices such as CDs, DVDs, USB "thumb" drives, external hard drives, or long-term digital tape backups. As you can see, there are numerous archival options when dealing with computers.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume you have chosen to digitize your family heritage research. What is the first step? First, all of the various media acquired must be converted into a digital format that a computer can store and play back. For photos and documents, this means you will need access to a scanner. Scanners take a picture of whatever has been placed on the scanning surface and convert those images into digital formats. Photos or documents may be stored in a number of standard computer formats, such as "jpeg" for photos and "plain text" or even Adobe "PDF" for text documents. Remember that small, fairly flat items may also be scanned in order to maintain a digital record of those precious mementos. (Continued...)