SERVICES
Family Digital Archives
Backlog’s professional archivists collect digital copies of family heirlooms, gather information about each item, and bring everything together to preserve your story for generations to come.
Do you collect family photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and other heirlooms? Have you conducted genealogy research and found documents that you not only want to save, but also want to share with others?
Maybe a relative has written names and dates on the backs of photos, or you remember a grandparent sharing a story along with a postcard from their favorite vacation. Or, perhaps you want to curate your genealogy collection, so that you can display certain information to the public and make more extensive information accessible to your family.
Traditional photo albums and scrapbooks are great for in-person viewing. But if you want to share a wealth of information with family members living in different places, and preserve images and data for the long term, creating a Digital Family Archive is a wonderful option.
How can Backlog help?
Backlog specializes in creating lasting Digital Family Archives. We can coordinate with your family to create and/or collect digital copies of family heirlooms, bring them together in one place, capture valuable information about each object, and upload your family data to a secure website to ensure they’re accessible in both the short- and long-term. The digitization process captures not only digital copies, but also key information about each object, including where the physical original is located. By collecting and connecting information about each digital object–also known as metadata–Backlog helps preserve your family’s past and present for future generations.
What’s the process?
Sorting and Storing
Before we begin to digitize items, Backlog works with you to sort, organize, and store your family’s treasures. For a comprehensive Digital Family Archive, we can crowdsource items and information from family members by asking them to upload digital copies of photographs, documents, clippings, and more. We will record metadata, including who physically has each original object. Alternatively, if you’re not ready to invest in a Family Digital Archive, we can work with you to sort your family papers and ensure they’re stored according to archival standards.
In either case, we’ll sort items either by family group or by date, and we’ll rehouse physical materials into archival-grade containers. We store photographs according to their chemical makeup. For example, a photograph developed at Walgreens in 1999 does not need the same level of care as a nineteenth century albumen print photograph. In addition, it is vitally important to store newspaper clippings separately from any other papers or photographs. As clippings age, they yellow, and the color will bleed onto and contaminate anything stored in the same box.
Digitization
After sorting and organizing your collection, we’ll begin the digitization process. We can digitize more of your family’s memories than you might realize, including, but not limited to, photographs, letters, postcards, prayer cards, funeral programs, newspaper clippings, report cards, or baseball cards. We can also digitally capture physical 3D items, such as military medals, children’s crafts, matchbooks, jewelry, coins, toys, even your collection of beanie babies.
We also capture metadata at the time of digitization. For example, for a photograph, metadata includes the location (if known), the date (exact or approximate), the individuals in the photograph, and any information written on the back.
Uploading to Permanent.org
To complete the process, we upload digitized items to a website for long-term storage and accessibility. Going forward, you can also upload current digital photographs, or even screenshots from video calls. At Backlog, we use Permanent.org to preserve your family data. Built with the future in mind, Permanent.org is a non-profit provider of cloud storage with an endowment to secure funding for its software development and upkeep for future generations. A one-time payment secures a perpetual, secure space on their servers. By uploading all of your data to Permanent.org, the files and records will be safe if physical records (including an external hard drive) are lost or damaged.
CASE STUDY
The Talevi Family Digital Archive
Backlog helped the family sort and organize the materials they’d collected, and then worked to transfer the files to Permanent.org, uploading the images and entering the accompanying metadata that the family had gathered.
Let’s work together.
Reach out for more information.