Preserving and digitizing our past can be a daunting project

Being relatively new to the world of microfilm, digitization, archiving, and all that is involved in any of these types of projects, I am beginning to understand how huge some of these undertakings can be.  Just read the blog from Deborah Wythe, who is Head of Digital Collections and Services at the Brooklyn Museum, in Brooklyn, New York.  Here is just a portion of what she has to say;

“The scale of ‘getting everything digitized’ is just mind boggling. In our small archives at the Brooklyn Museum, we have about 1,600 feet of documents, photographs, negatives, ledger books — just about any analog format you can imagine, covering the Museum’s history from 1823 to the present. Here’s the math: at an estimated 3,000 documents per foot, that’s 4.8 million items. Even if you could scan, describe and process 30 per hour (highly unlikely), that’s 160,000 hours of work, or 20,000 eight-hour workdays.”

Wow!  Think about that for a moment - 160,000 hours just to digitize the historical flotsam and jetsam of one museum.  Mind-boggling indeed!

What brought this all to mind was watching my wife go through all our “analog” photos last weekend.  This project started about a month ago when she cleaned out the attic in search of all our old photos.  She thought it was about time to get them sorted, cataloged, and put in some semblance of order.  Great idea, honey!  Have fun!

I just went through this process myself, except I did mine digitally.  I have the photos from our digital camera on my hard drive, usually by month and year (the default setting for downloads).  About 10 hours later I had over 6,000 photos cataloged and indexed by category, year, and subject.  I don’t even want to guess how long it will take Laura to do the same thing.  My only fear?  She’ll come to me and say, “Honey, can you scan these so we have them on the computer?”

But as with any project, nothing is so hard as the thought of doing it.  If you think about all the work involved, the time, the sheer SIZE of the project, you’ll never get started.  For those of you who have a project of this type on your radar, whether you’re at a library, historical society, museum, or genealogical society, don’t think about how big the project is.  You just need to get started.  Don’t wait.  A lot of what you have is totally irreplaceable.  Time’s a’wastin’!

Wait . . . I think I hear my wife calling me.