So you’ve become the family archivist — chosen by fate, or more likely you’re simply the only one with the interest and the capability to understand what you’re doing and why it needs doing.
Congratulations — this is both the most rewarding and the most painful job all at the same time. You’ll find yourself dealing with family who have little understanding of the value of those important videos or photos they threw out, making decisions about how much quality is enough and how many of those 10,000 photos you should scan, and diagnosing hardware and software problems just to do your basic archiving job — only to realise you made the wrong call and have to start over to meet your quality requirements. It takes strong will and patience.
And then where do you store it all? How do you ensure your effort lasts the test of time and is of value to future generations? Do you stop with just digitising what’s there into masters other people can wade through? Or do you try to repair some of the inevitable damage? The problems are many — and just like the tongue-in-cheek photo above, you’ll often end up being considered the Einstein of the family, even if your IQ is pretty normal. This site aims to become a support network for like-minded people, to help you make the right decisions for your particular requirements.
Don’t expect it to be easy
We are in an age of extreme carelessness and waste. On one hand, our ability to take photographs and video of important memories has never been greater; on the other, most people have no idea how to select, look after or store this important data.
The current direction of travel is likely to produce the most forgotten generational and historical imagery the world has ever seen — the norm now being to take a hundred careless pictures of a moment, never choosing a best one and never exporting it anywhere permanent, instead leaving it to the will of the encrypted cloud, with its risks of forgotten payments, death, technology outages, lost passwords and personal mistakes, any of which can instantly erase every precious recorded moment. The lack of skill instilled in the masses, who think that Facebook is a backup, is truly remarkable. Compare that to previous generations, who had physical media that could sit in a box for decades with little harm and any degradation still recoverable, all without management, and the problem comes into focus. I’ll leave that thought here as some thought-provoking context for what we as digital archivists do, and how we ought to do it.
A multi-year journey
For most people this will be a multi-year job, and it will almost certainly grow as family hear what you’re doing and you uncover more important sources to archive in a quality befitting future generations. In the many years I’ve now been doing this, I still haven’t archived everything I set out to. Recently a family member mentioned they had the missing 8mm film I’d been hunting for years — despite having asked before and being told they didn’t have it. What a wonderful Christmas present that was. And now begins the long journey of working out how best to archive it: send it away, buy a machine, or build one. All of this accounts only for previous generations’ media — but at least future generations will have a better understanding of where they came from.
With the combination of deteriorating physical media from generations past and the limited foresight surrounding the challenges of digital technologies, never has there been a more pressing need for digital archivists to prevent a multi-generational loss of history.
I welcome you to the Digital Archivist and look forward to discussing, debating and learning from each other as we navigate these challenging waters.
Marshalleq
If you’re ready to move from the why to the how, Designing a family archive that survives you covers it in two parts — Part I on backups and Part II on preservation — and the glossary of terms is there for any unfamiliar jargon along the way.
