A labour of love and librarianship: Archiving the family photos (Part 2)

Hello!  I know, I know, you’d probably given me up for dead.  A review of my New Year’s Resolutions fills me with shame and regret – a quick recap:

1. Give up drinking for January.
   Ah, well.  Ahem.  Moving on…
2. Learn to preserve food.
   This actually happened!  I have created pickled carrots and radishes!  See here!
3. Finish knitting this goddamn jumper.
   I still have three months!  Three!  *knits furiously*
4. Start writing this goddamn novel.
   I started a different one instead.  I’m calling this progress.  Shuddup.
5. Learn French.
   Nothing has happened AT ALL on this one.  Tres tres mal.
6. Get fit.
   Me and Jillian Michaels are once again in our sadistic abusive relationship.  The effects are as yet to be discerned.
7. Let my work into my life.
   This has really been happening!  I attended LILAC 2014, the information literacy conference, and got fully fascinated by all things info lit.  This expanded my Twitter-sphere of librarians and information professionals, and crammed my brain full of ideas for the future.
8. Be a good mentor.
   Another check!  The mentor scheme is complete, and I think we both got a lot out of the scheme.  More on this later.
9. Pick up my trumpet.
   Once again, ahem.
10. Write. Write write write write write!
    I have been writing, but nothing that is fit to be seen, unfortunately.  I have been loving writing it though, which was kind of the point!

So a mixed bag of success and failure, so far – let’s hope it’s a productive three months more.

So what on earth have I been doing all this time, I hear you cry?  Well, among other things, I have been getting cracking on this family photo project.  Although the bulk of the work is still to be done, there have been two significant steps forward:

1. Equipment
   I have acquired a photo scanner!  It’s an HP Scanjet 4850, and I’d love to pretend this was the result of an extended assessment and decision-making process, but in fact, this is what I was able to obtain second hand from family.  Seems to work fine though.
2. Software
   I spent a lot of time agonising about the appropriate method to catalogue these photos.  I couldn’t afford to shell out for a specialist piece of software; but the ultimate goal in all this was to share these photos with my family – a voluminous Excel spreadsheet of details with attachments was hardly going to fit the bill either.  Various free tools were tried and failed to fit the bill.  At this point, my colleague suggested Evernote – she was using it herself for a similar project, although she went on to describe the tool as “where I keep my life” (with a certain evangelical gleam in her eyes).  Having gotten started with Evernote, I was initially and pre-emptively thrilled (“This is exactly what I need!”) and then briefly disappointed (“What the hell kind of bloody hierarchy options are these?  Why is search so woundingly basic and stupid??”), and am now moving through the stages of Software Grief towards acceptance.  No, it doesn’t do everything I want it to do.  Yes, it does do enough to meet the purposes of 90% of the people who will use it.  Yes, it’s free.  Yes, it’s shareable and interactive.  Yes, you CAN search quickly and reliably for all the photos in the collection of you as a gappy toddler/your gran as a stunning newlywed.  It is good enough.

So I have the tools; I have the photos; what I still lack is any real strategy.  I have started scanning and indexing photos on a “I like this one” basis, but I have no long term plan.  I also still have no real systematic way of dealing with the fact that I have very little info on a lot of the photographs – mysterious men in uniform and ladies in Sunday hats abound.  Not to mention the ephemera.  Any tips from librarians/archivists/de facto family historians on ways to address these matters would be greatly appreciated.  In the meantime, please see below a picture of me, looking slightly barking mad, as a child.  Enjoy!

A labour of love and librarianship: Archiving the family photos (Part 1)

As I have mentioned here before, I have never been much of an owner of things.  Not that I don’t acquire things; I am as much a victim of our consumer culture as the next person, and almost ludicrously susceptible to suggestion.  Advertising was made for chumps like me, who are easy to convince that the purchase of some item, the acquisition of some bit of stuff can represent the turning point in their life, when they will finally start becoming the person they always wanted to be, just because the thing in question is the kind of lovely thing that such a wonderful person might have.  Unfortunately, it tends to work the opposite way round, and the thing, however, desirable and desired, loses its lustre as soon as I possess it, because surely if I can possess a thing, surely the thing itself can’t be so rare and wonderful as all that?

So I fall out of love with my possessions.  I lose them and give them away.  Every now and then (usually when moving house, but sometimes just when cleaning), a wild fit of eleutheromania comes over me, and I give in to the urge to ‘rationalise’ my possessions.  In fact, there’s nothing rational about it – it’s just an extension, or reversal, of the futile yearnings that drive my acquisitions in the first place: I want, in these moments, to be the kind of person who steps lightly through the world, who could – if they needed to – put all their worldly goods into a small suitcase and disappear, never call or write. Of course, getting rid of all my things doesn’t make me that kind of person; it just means I have nothing to read or wear.

In contrast to me, several of my loved ones are collectors to an almost pathological degree.  I spent an enjoyable but slightly mad afternoon a couple of weeks ago sitting on my best friend’s living room floor, drinking green ginger wine that she did not remember having bought and going through her superfluous stuff with a view to selling most of it at a boot fair. I found it strange to watch how hard it was for her to part with even damaged necklaces or half-used tubes of body cream.  She was very self-aware of her tendency to hoard, and actively trying to suppress it (the mess was getting a bit out of hand), but even so, she kept far more than I ever would have.

I had a similar double-take moment when I was moving in with my partner.  Helping him pack, I discovered that he had kept all of his old white shirts from secondary school (he was at this point 24 years old), as well as several knackered pairs of Converse, a uniform shade of washed-out grey with uppers barely clinging to their soles, which he lamely explained he’d kept “in case I ever needed them”.  Although I prevailed upon him to throw these away, he still has more books than he could ever read (and continues to add to the collection), as well as a whole drawerful of t-shirts, of which he wears only about five in strict rotation, the others being in various stages of decomposition but still allegedly “wearable”.  We’ve pretty much come to terms about this – although I sometimes feel swamped by things not mine, like I’m living in someone else’s home, I have got to acknowledge this is mainly because I choose not have much stuff, and his expands to fill the space provided.

My mother is another hoarder.  Up until recently, this has not presented too much of an issue.  She lives with her husband in a 3-bed house with an extensive loft, with more than enough room for a lifetime’s worth of tat.  A series of bereavements in more recent years have added substantially to her holdings, as crockery and furniture and bric-a-brac that no-one had the heart to sort or sell at the time fell into her possession, was tidied away and then forgotten.  Now, after almost 20 years in her home, she is selling up and moving to the North East, and the mountains of stuff must be confronted, decimated and transported.

As part of this exercise, I have inherited a jumbled mass of family photographs, interspersed with other ephemera like certificates, postcards, and letters.  The majority of these come from the combined estates of my late great aunt and uncle – he was a keen photographer, and both were adventurous travellers throughout their lives, being unencumbered by children.  Another large chunk comes from my grandmother, every surface in whose living room groaned with photographs of her three children and their children.  Others are my mother’s own, and others yet come from goodness knows were.  All in all, the collection fills two large crates.

The reason these have fallen to me is that, as a librarian, I have been deemed the best person to organise, rationalise and digitise these photographs.  The reason I have snapped them up is a bit more complicated; why would I, with my history of discarding, take on such a substantial volume of discarded history?

Part of it is simple professional interest.  While I never got round to cataloguing the books in our house (something lots of baby librarians apparently do as an exercise when they begin their Masters degrees) I do have the usual compulsion to organise and classify that goes with the profession; the mixed-up state the photos are currently in cries out for redress.  Moreover, the consummately digital nature of modern-day photography means that collections like this, full of one-of-a-kind prints, undated, with no GPS-determined locations or subjects identified by facial recognition software, will more or less cease to exist in a few decades.  It’s a privilege and a challenge to put the effort into rehabilitating these photos, to weave them out of their isolation into the ongoing visual history being created in the digital age.

The larger part of my desire to undertake this project is more to do with a sense of time running out.  The collection contains material from the early 1900s right up to my own teenage years.  Already, too many of the people in these pictures – my family – are strangers to me, and too many of the people who I could have asked who they were aren’t around anymore to tell me.  If this collection goes into my mother’s new attic, by the time they reappear again, the names of these people and places and the stories that go with them could be lost forever.

Finally, there’s the personal side of this, the desire to learn about my family – the ones I never knew, the ones I miss, and the ones I see all the time but may never have asked about a particular day when such-and-such a photograph was taken.

As the title indicates, this is only part one – I’m going to blog this project as I go, and update on the steps I take (and the mistakes I’ll doubtless make) in case it is of interest to anyone trying to do the same thing.  I’ll also take the opportunity to ask questions of a practical nature to any archivists or librarians who may be lurking about here – I’m going to need all the help I can get!  So, starting as I mean to go on…

Questions for librarians

1.  The digitisation part of the project will be challenging, but already I’m looking beyond it to the far bigger quandary – what do I do with the hard copy? Should I dispose of it altogether once digitised, or does it have value on its own account?  If so, how should I classify and organise it – by date, location, subject?
2. I am trying to conserve space by getting rid of the frames and albums – but at what point does a frame/album become a valuable, index-worthy piece of ephemera in its own right?  A lot of the pictures are stuck in Christmas cards etc. – should these be kept together as a single item, or separated and catalogued separately as photograph and card?