Welcome to Throwback Thursday! This holiday season, I hope to inspire you to take a trip down memory lane to the land of erstwhile and bygone days of the family photo album. What better time to pull these one of a kind treasures off the shelves than during the family festivities! Recently over the Thanksgiving holiday, I rediscovered my own family’s quasi-prehistoric, long-forgotten photo albums. As I flipped through the pages looking at photos of my mom, tan and beautiful on a beach somewhere before I was born, or at my younger sisters giggling at birthday parties, and awkward middle school outfits and family photos, I thought what a great gift it would be to share this album with my siblings. If only my parents had used a digital camera- then I could just click and share! So simple, right?
And yet, even though with the ability to share my digital photos so easily, they are scattered throughout the internet, on computers, phones, flash drives, and attached in emails. Not to mention the preservation issues with digital images. Perhaps this is why it is refreshing to view these unique hand held albums of carefully chosen and collected photographs that tell a story in a cohesive pattern.
So, this holiday season, if you too have the urge to dust off those family photo albums and share them digitally with your loved ones, then this post is for you! Or better yet, digitize them, and then create a physical copy to give as a holiday gift, just like the original. You could even supplement the facsimile with your new digital photos to add to the legacy! To help you, my colleagues and I have assembled some useful tips on how to digitize your family/travel photo album or family book (or even your grandmother’s handwritten cookbook) and make a physical facsimile:
- Here is our recent answer with links on how to digitize your family photo album or historic book and create a physical facsimile, from our Collections Care Forum.
- The New York Times also answered some questions about how to scan your photographs and photo album in this helpful Q & A session.
- May I also suggest you take the opportunity of viewing the full-length television program Jefferson’s Secret Bible while it is still available for viewing on the Smithsonian Channel. Your object may not be as technically complex, but it is still a fascinating story and instructive opportunity on creating a physical facsimile.
- The National Archives: Preserving and digitizing photo collections
- The Library of Congress: Preserving your Memories: Traditional albums and scrapbooks
- And don’t forget to check out my colleagues excellent posts on preserving your photo album prior to any digitization and Archiving Family Traditions!
Happy holidays and happy digitizing!
Related Resources
- Digitization, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Scantastic: Scanning Archival images to make them more useful, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
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