Overview
Purpose
My mother has a large collection of photo albums with photographs dating back to the late 1960s. These photographs tell the story of my mother's upbringing in Jamaica, her family's migration to Canada, and life in Canada. These cherished photographs and the stories that went along with them taught me about my heritage. This project was created to serve as a personal digital archive for a selection of these family photographs. The objective was to preserve these photographs and their descriptive information in order to and make them accessible to family members within and outside of Canada.Methodology
To begin this project, I worked with my supervisor John Richan to develop a workflow for my personal archive process. This workflow included establishing photograph selection, digitization procedures, analog and digital preservation, recording metadata, and digital platform selection. As part of this project, I also constructed a reading list of relevant sources regarding personal digital archiving to compile an annotated bibliography.The oldest photo album in my mother's collection was selected for preservation. The photographs were carefully removed from the sticky album using a flat metal spatula and placed in mylar sleeves. The photographs were scanned at 300 dots-per-inch (DPI) and saved as 24-bit colour JPEG files. To scan the photographs, I used an EPSON Express 10000XL scanner that was made available to me by the Records Management and Archives Department at Concordia University. The fonds was given an arbitrary identification number, P01. The individual photographs were labeled by fonds number, followed by the position of the photograph by photo album page number, then the position of the photograph on the page. For example, the photograph “Catherine” was given the identifier P01-12-05. This was done to respect the original order of the photographs in the collection.
Cloud services in which I already had existing accounts on Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as, a computer hard drive and USB drive were used as backup storage for the digitized images. The open-source application Bagger, which was designed and created by the U.S. Library of Congress, was used as the primary digital preservation tool. Bagger follows the BagIt file packaging format which is used for packaging, transferring, storing, and verifying digital content and metadata in a standardized way. BagIt formatted packages known as "Bags," are structured directories that provide direct access to digital images and their metadata, such as file manifests, checksums, and payload size. These Bags can be transferred and backed-up to multiple virtual storage services. Cloud services Google Drive and Dropbox were used to store back ups of Bags. I plan on verifying the checksums of the digital images annually to ensure the files have not been corrupted or altered in any way (Kunze et al., 2018).
To collect the metadata, I interviewed my mother and consulted with her sister Pauline to determine the context behind the photographs. For the digital platform, it was important for me to use one that allows users to engage with the digital images and contribute their stories and memories. It was equally important to have a digital platform that could display the digital images, metadata, annotated bibliography, and the project overview.
Scalar, an open-source digital humanities publishing platform, was selected because it supports born digital scholarship with built in Dublin Core metadata. Scalar was also selected for its pathway functionality to show the relationship between the fonds and item levels of the digital archive following the Rules for Archival Description standard (RAD). Inspiration for this project include A Photographic History of Oregon State University and Performing Archive, which are both Scalar projects that provide access to digital collections.
Limitations & Challenges
Photograph selection for digital access copies was more difficult than I had anticipated. In total there are 82 photographs in the photo album, however, for the scope of this project I could only create a limited number of access copies. I decided to select photographs that were most in need of preservation based on their age and condition. Privacy concerns were also an issue in this project. As I envisioned the project as a public and shareable archive, there was a need to balance this with privacy. As the collection contains photographs of extended family members and friends, I selected photographs that included immediate family members who could consent to their images being used. According to the Smithsonian Institutional Archives (n.d.), the recommended digital preservation practice is to scan images at 600 pixels per inch (PPI) and save colour images as TIFF files with a 24-bit RGB (Red Green Blue) colour mode. However, TIFF files were not created for this project as they are large, high resolution files that require more storage than I was able to provide. Instead, the photographs were scanned at 300 dots-per-inch (DPI) and saved as 24-bit colour JPEG files, which is an acceptable image quality for preservation according to the National Archives (2003).Recommendations
For anyone who is interested in creating their own personal digital archive out of family photographs, there are a few recommendations for best practices. You should first think about the organization of the records, if they are not placed in photo albums they should be organized and stored in mylar sleeves. If they are originally organized in photo albums, the condition of the albums should be assessed, and if needed the photographs should be transferred to mylar sleeves for preservation purposes. Be sure to record any inscriptions with names, dates, places, or any other contextual information into the new album. If the original album is a sticky album with adhesive, the photographs can be carefully removed using a flat metal spatula or floss. It is not recommended to add adhesive directly to the original photographs.You should consider taking high resolution scans or pictures of each photograph as a preservation action. If the photographs are fragile or moldy, you may wish to take pictures of the original images as an alternate way to digitize them. If mold is present in your collection, you should do research on how to work with moldy photographs to avoid any health hazards and the spread of mold to the rest of the collection (National Museum of American History, 2010). If possible, photographs should be scanned at 600 dots-per-inch (DPI) and saved as 24-bit colour TIFF files or 8-bit grey scale TIFF files. Otherwise, it is acceptable to scan images at 300 dots-per-inch (DPI) and save them as 24-bit colour JPEG files or 8-bit grey scale JPEG files (National Archives, 2003). If you do not wish to, or are unable to scan the photographs yourself, there are public and private archival companies who provide digitization services. When researching companies, be sure that they follow best practices and have quality equipment for scanning (National Museum of American History, 2010).
It is important to plan for obsolescence, upgrades, and file migration to ensure long term management and future access to your digital images. It is recommended to keep several back ups of your digital images such as on a computer hard drive, an external hard drive, a USB drive, and cloud services such as Dropbox. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) (n.d.) specifies storing at least 3 copies of your files and metadata in geographic locations that can be affected by different disaster threats as a best practice. If you are using online storage, be sure to select a digital platform or cloud service that will upload the digital images with the same resolution they were scanned or photographed at. Digital platforms such as Flickr and Internet Archive's Ourmedia are useful and free services for storing high resolution photographs with descriptive information. When selecting a digital platform or cloud service, it is important to consider privacy and access issues (Beagrie, 2005). The Bagger application is recommended as a digital preservation tool to generate file manifests, checksums, and to store digital images and metadata. Bags can be transferred to another party or stored in cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox for back ups. Checksum verification can be run against the digital images at regular intervals to ensure that the files have not been corrupted or altered.
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Beagrie, N. (2005). Plenty of room at the bottom? Personal digital libraries and collections. D-Lib Magazine, 11(06). https://doi.org/10.1045/june2005-beagrie
Kunze, J., Littman, J., Madden, E., & Adams, C. (2018, October). The BagIt File Packing Format (V1.0). Retrieved from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8493
National Archives. (2003, November 12). Digital photographic records [Blog]. Retrieved April 1, 2018, from https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/digital-photo-records.html
National Digital Stewardship Alliance. (n.d.). Levels of digital preservation. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from http://ndsa.org//activities/levels-of-digital-preservation/
National Museum of American History. (2010, November 8). You asked, we answer: Taking care of your own archives [Blog]. Retrieved June 5, 2018, from http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2010/11/you-asked-we-answered-taking-care-of-your-own-archives.html
Smithsonian Institutional Archives. (n.d.). Digitizing collections [Blog]. Retrieved April 1, 2018, from https://siarchives.si.edu/what-we-do/digital-curation/digitizing-collections
