Digital Archiving

Here are a few tidbits I gleaned from the webinar “Be Your Own Digital Archivist: Preserve Your Research” as presented by Cyndi Ingle at the SCGS Jamboree 2016.  My favorites are below, and I’ve put the handout in the V: drive, Clayton Library Files, In-service Training.

• Organize the folders on your computer in a simple logical way, and use the same system in your email and on your cloud or backup storage.
• Use a good file naming convention such as “1940 US Census Long Beach, CA, Florence MONROE, Ancestry.jpg” which shows what the document is, who it relates to, and where you found it.  You can also add information to the properties for each file.
• When scanning photos, scan as a TIFF in the highest resolution possible (600 dpi), and save this as a Master File.  If you want to enhance or share a scanned photo, make a copy as a JPG and make alterations to the JPG.
•  One way to capture the photo information on the photo is to add a small white border to the photo (by adding canvas size) and put a text box into the white space.
• Denise Levenick has a blog called TheFamilyCurator.com related to preserving and sharing family memories.  She has also written a couple of books. 
•  According to Cyndi, Amazon Prime is now offering Cloud service as part of their package, which may be of interest to folks.
   

 
Patti