Digital Archiving

In any archiv­ing process, it is impor­tant to deter­mine what is of val­ue, what should be pre­served, and what should be rel­e­gat­ed to the recy­cling bin. Once you have whit­tled the piles down to the genealog­i­cal­ly and his­tor­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing pho­tographs, film and video, and audio record­ings, you might ask your­self: “Now what?” This arti­cle will attempt to answer that ques­tion for the dig­i­tal archiv­ing of audio, video, and pho­tog­ra­phy.

Since you want to both pre­serve this mate­r­i­al and make it avail­able to fam­i­ly and oth­er researchers, the best approach is to repro­duce it in a com­put­er for­mat — to dig­i­tize it. You can do this at home, as a do-it-your­self project, or you can have some­one else per­form it as a ser­vice for you.

Digital Archiving

First off , it is impor­tant to under­stand that dig­i­tal or elec­tron­ic archiv­ing is not about destroy­ing the orig­i­nal doc­u­ment. If the orig­i­nal doc­u­ment is of val­ue, you want to pre­serve it. Your elec­tron­ic copy will pro­vide quick access to the doc­u­ment, with­out hav­ing to touch the orig­i­nal, as well as pro­vid­ing a back­up should some­thing hap­pen to the orig­i­nal. Sec­ond­ly, you want to pre­serve the elec­tron­ic ver­sion itself by mak­ing back­ups of it, both local­ly and remote­ly.

To per­form dig­i­tal archiv­ing, no mat­ter what the orig­i­nal media:

1. Gath­er the mate­ri­als you want to archive. You will want to do a pre­lim­i­nary assess­ment. Do you have two or twen­ty video­tapes of the grand­kids? Do you have one or sev­en­ty audio­cas­settes of your brother’s thes­pi­an exploits? Do you have fifty or five hun­dred pho­tographs of your ances­tors? The scale of the task fig­ures into your deci­sion whether to do the archiv­ing your­self or hire some­one.
2. Assess the mate­ri­als for fragili­ty, rar­i­ty, and abil­i­ty to be dig­i­tized. Most pho­tographs, even frag­ile ones, can eas­i­ly be scanned on a flatbed scan­ner (where you lay the doc­u­ment flat for imag­ing). But you nev­er want to put a pho­to­graph through a sheet-feed scan­ner. Sim­i­lar con­sid­er­a­tions apply for the fragili­ty of audio and video record­ings. As you do this dig­i­tal archiv­ing work, you should lim­it any risk where what you are doing may dam­age or destroy the orig­i­nal.
3. Decide whether you should do it your­self or con­tract some­one else to do it. Con­sid­er whether you have the time, skills, and tools to do the job your­self.
4. Get start­ed and fol­low through to the end of your project. It will be help­ful if you break larg­er projects into small­er sub-projects, so you can see progress and expe­ri­ence some of the thrill of com­plet­ing each step.
5. Set up stor­age and both local and remote back­up sys­tems for the dig­i­tal archives. (I will dis­cuss local and remote back­up in a lat­er arti­cle.)

If you decide to con­vert your audio your­self, you will need a native play­er for your media, such as a turntable or a cas­sette deck, and a way to con­nect that to your com­put­er. Macs and PCs often have audio input jacks, but if yours does not, you can use Griffin’s iMic for the Mac <www.griffin.com>, and sim­i­lar prod­ucts for the PC, to con­nect your ana­log audio source to your com­put­er.

You will also need soft­ware to turn the audio into dig­i­tal files. The free soft­ware prod­uct Audac­i­ty <audacity.sourceforge.net> con­verts ana­log audio to dig­i­tal. Sony’s Sound Forge prod­ucts <www.sonycreativesoft ware.com/products/soundforgefamily.asp> (alas, not free!) do this as well. Final­ly, a com­plete sys­tem for con­vert­ing LPs and 78s (includ­ing a turntable with built-in pre­am­pli­fi­er, soft­ware, and con­nec­tors for your com­put­er) is avail­able from DAK <www.dak.com>, a well-known ven­dor for elec­tron­ic hob­by­ists.

If you do not want to go through the work involved in set­ting your­self up for con­ver­sion of ana­log audio to dig­i­tal files, or you don’t want to buy equip­ment you may use only once, you may look into hir­ing a com­pa­ny to do the work. One of the best known cas­sette and LP dig­i­ti­za­tion out­fits is Reclaim Media <www.reclaimmedia.com>, 866–669- 6496. On its Web site, the com­pa­ny claims that it has dig­i­tized 227,351 cas­settes and LPs since 2002. The Cana­di­an com­pa­ny Rip­styles <www.ripstyles.com>, 866–391-8447 in the U.S., (866–694-5302 in Cana­da) pri­mar­i­ly pro­vides a CD “rip­ping” ser­vice to take audio on a CD that you own to a dig­i­tal file (in any of sev­er­al

for­mats) that can be deliv­ered on a CD, a hard disk, or an iPod. In addi­tion to CD con­ver­sion, it also con­verts audio­cas­sette tapes and LPs. The com­pa­ny has a part­ner­ship with BestBuy’s Geek Squad (which does not, unfor­tu­nate­ly, allow you to drop off your media at your local Best­Buy).

Aside from doc­u­ments, the items that geneal­o­gists have in most abun­dance and most want to share with their fam­i­ly and oth­er researchers are pho­tographs. Many of us have scanned images over the years in var­i­ous res­o­lu­tions and for­mats. If you are scan­ning for archival pur­pos­es, this means that at some point you might want to print the pho­tos out. You should not scan sim­ply for Web shar­ing, as you will only have to scan again if you want to get a good print of the image. You should scan your images at the high­est res­o­lu­tion pos­si­ble. Res­o­lu­tion is mea­sured in dots-per-inch; 600 DPI should be your min­i­mum. Also, you should not save in JPG for­mat. JPG uses a “lossy” form of com­pres­sion, that is, one that los­es some of the data as it tries to con­trol file size. It is much more

prefer­able to go with TIF, PNG, or GIF. These for­mats com­press the image file in ways that do not sac­ri­fice image qual­i­ty. PNG is the newest of these for­mats, and can be dis­played direct­ly on the Web, as can JPG and GIF. How­ev­er, the res­o­lu­tion you will be scan­ning at will be too high for the Web, so you will need to also make low-res­o­lu­tion ver­sions. I rec­om­mend scan­ning to a high-res­o­lu­tion TIF and then using an image man­age­ment tool such as Google’s Picasa <picasa.google.com> or Apple’s iPho­to or Aper­ture to cre­ate low­er res­o­lu­tion ver­sions for Web shar­ing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, you will want to look at image cor­rec­tion. While you are scan­ning, there are a num­ber of ways to improve the image. Col­or casts or fad­ing from print degra­da­tion can be adjust­ed and you can touch up the image to remove creas­es or tears in the pho­to­graph from your scan. If you are not a pho­tog­ra­phy or dig­i­tal imag­ing pro­fes­sion­al, you might want to hire out this task.

There are sev­er­al ser­vices that will take your pho­to­graph­ic images, scan them, and return the orig­i­nals along with high-res­o­lu­tion JPG or TIFF files. Among the best known are Foto­Bridge <www.fotobridge.com>, Scan­Cafe <www.scancafe.com>, and DigMyP­ics <www.digmypics.com>. The way these ser­vices work is that you order ser­vices from the Web site, then send in your media. Some require a par­tial pay­ment in advance, but they seem to all allow you to reject any items that you do not want, and receive cred­it for them. Foto­bridge and Scan­Cafe focus on dig­i­ti­za­tion of print­ed pho­tographs, slides, and neg­a­tives. DigMyP­ics works with these for­mats, but also trans­fers VHS and 8mm film to dig­i­tal for­mats, pro­vid­ing either an editable AVI file or a DVD of the video or film con­ver­sions, or both. Anoth­er com­pa­ny that con­verts VHS and 8mm film to dig­i­tal for­mats is iMem­o­ries <www.imemories.com>. It does not seem to pro­vide an AVI option, but does deliv­er a DVD you can watch on your TV.

One draw­back with most of the ser­vices I have men­tioned is that they rely on ship­ping your rare items to have them con­vert­ed to dig­i­tal for­mats. (Scan­Cafe even takes the pho­tographs you send to them in San Fran­cis­co, and re-ships them to India and back.) While there is some risk in this, it’s not as if your archives are com­plete­ly safe in your house. Even under your pro­tec­tion, they may be attacked by pests or sim­ply degrade and decay while you con­sid­er if this is the right thing to do. How­ev­er, if the ship­ping con­cerns you, you might look for local com­pa­nies that pro­vide sim­i­lar ser­vices, or you might make ana­log copies of your trea­sures (for exam­ple, a copy of the tape of your father’s speech), or your own best attempt at image scans, pri­or to send­ing your pho­tographs or tapes off to be dig­i­tized.

Whether you use a local or a remote ven­dor to cre­ate a dig­i­tal archive copy of your pho­tographs, audio, and video, or do it your­self, please do it. Many of the items in these media are sim­ply not very sta­ble, and the longer you wait, the more like­ly it is that you will lose some or all of the val­ue of the heir­loom. Dig­i­tiz­ing these doc­u­ments can pro­vide you with a back­up copy and the abil­i­ty to share them as wide­ly as you want.