Since moving to Florida, all my stuff is in boxes. Boxes upon boxes would be a better way of putting it. While rooting through yet another box to find my omelet pan, I had a flashback to a similar 'root' at my parents house: our family photo album.
Album is generous to the point of requiring confession; It's an old family lift-top table piled high with photographs of varying sizes, shapes, and states of decay, interspersed with the yellowing remains of Kodak, Walgreens, and Eckerd (remember Eckerd?) photo negative envelopes.
Needless to say, that flashback came with an impending sense of Doom. However, Doom was quickly trumped by the thought of a new project to scan, catalog, and store my family's photos in a manner that would prevent their further degradation.
So, how exactly does a modern geek go about figuring out what's necessary for a project like this? This isn't a solved problem, and it gets more complicated all the time. The Library of Congress has an entire program, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, devoted to collecting, preserving, and presenting this type of content for future generations. It's a national problem, and I'm hoping it'll scale down for me.
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