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A Priceless Archive of Ordinary Life
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 4y agoThe 400 scrapbooks can be preserved by simply photographing each page with a phone camera. I've preserved scrapbooks this way - it's simple, fast, cheap, and it works. Yes, you can read all the text in the photos. Then this photo archive can be put online for researchers and anyone interested.
- asdefghyk 4y agopreferably with a camera stand and appropriate lighting, in my opinion .....
- WalterBright 4y agoIn my experience, it's not necessary. Try it yourself and see.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThere are some iOS apps which do a great job of automatically finding the edges of the paper, correcting for perspective and creating PDFs. The one I use also uploads the end result to a cloud service of your choice. Fragile documents and especially books don't fare well on scanners.
- WalterBright 4y agoWhile such apps are a nice improvement, if you photograph the book pages in strong light the depth of field is increased such that the whole page is sharp despite being curved and at an angle. Also motion blur from holding the phone in your hand will be minimized. So it still works.
- abracadaniel 4y agoIt sounds like some of the pieces are in rough enough shape that trying to open them without special preparations would cause permanent damage, but it does seem like it's worth doing that for the ones in good enough shape. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.
- Thermosetty 4y ago"....scholars recognize the profound importance of materials such as the Dorsey collection—resources collected and preserved informally by African Americans at a time when white historians claimed that African Americans had no history to speak of." Imagine how much Black American (descendants of slaves) history has been lost to time because of mindsets like this. Tragic too because they built this country, yet the full extent of their contributions will never be known.
- WalterBright 4y agoExpecting someone else to document one's own history isn't going to work that well. For example, I gathered together the information my family had on my grandfather's experience as a coaler on the yacht Eleanor during its trip around the world in 1895. It's now part of the Slater Museum. (The Eleanor was owned and operated by the Slaters.) They were pretty anxious to get it, as nobody had bothered to document what happened on the ship.
- actionfromafar 4y agoNo it won't but I imagine it helps if someone is willing to accept that documentation into its collections.
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- WalterBright 4y agoI put it up on my own website, where it sat for a couple years until some researcher from the Slater Museum found it.
- actionfromafar 4y agoAn option not available to black historians in the 19th century.