Protecting Treasured Images - Family and Historical Society Photo Preservation

When famed photographer Ansel Adams was once asked which of his wife or his negatives he would first save from a burning house, his reply was thoughtful. "My wife, she could help me get the negs out!"

Ansel had a plan, and the rest of us should as well. Many families and community historical societies could do a much better job in planning to protect against a disaster. A bit of thoughtful disaster planning can also help to develop overall preservation and sharing priorities.

A logical first step is to develop a good sense of what you have in your collection. Although a worthy goal, I am not necessarily suggesting a complete assessment and cataloging. Rather, a rough idea of what categories are located where.

The next step is to visualize the potential pain associated with the loss of certain categories, and then develop a plan to best protect these most important categories. Perhaps your historical society has certain categories that best reflect your mission. Perhaps family photos of the immediate family are deemed more important than high school yearbooks and other memorabilia.

Thinking about what would be most tragic to lose can help you to develop priorities and a plan to protect your most treasured images. Developing priorities is important to many families and community historical societies as they must allocate limited time and budgets.

In many cases, there are things that can be done quickly and inexpensively to protect at least a portion of a collection. If a family or historical society has a portion of their collection already in digital format, an easy protective step is to duplicate the files to a CD, DVD, or memory stick, and to place the backups off premise with a family relative, society officer, or in a safe deposit box.

When considering priorities, it is also important to remember that the "importance" and "quality" of images do vary. If an image simply does not "speak" to us any longer, it should probably be assigned a lower priority in our preservation activities.

Giving some honest thought to what you would miss most in your image collection in the event of a calamity and total loss will help you prioritize your preservation and collection activities, and better understand where you should focus your energy, time, and money in photo and document preservation and sharing activities.

Like most things in life, it may be that the 80/20 rule can be applied to image preservation and sharing. Perhaps roughly 20% of your collection deserves 80% of your efforts, and 80% of the audience for the images is most interested in roughly 20% of the collection.

In a recent culling and scanning project of our family's photo prints, we eliminated about 80% by weight and feel pretty good about it. It was interesting that my wife did the first cull, and I did a secondary review of eliminated prints. In each and every case, when I had a question about keeping a print she had eliminated, she was able to quickly produce a better print of the related person, place, or event. Indeed, we only needed the best family reunion group photo from ten years ago, not all ten photos taken at the time.

Prints that remain have been scanned, duplicate CDs are in the safe deposit box, and digital images are being shared in a variety of ways. We do have the originals stored in archival boxes, but take considerable comfort in knowing that duplicate images are always available and have been shared more widely.

For additional tips on preservation and sharing activities for families and historical or genealogical societies, visit LocalArchiver.com.