 Okay, I'm going to mute myself and I'm going to go ahead and start the webinar. Hello, good morning. Good morning. Welcome. My name is Dee Dee Kramer, and I am a librarian here at San Francisco Public Library here to say I'm excited to host Margot notes day to discuss creating family archives. Before introducing Margot, I'd like to take a couple of minutes to offer a land acknowledgement and then share an upcoming program announcement. So for the land acknowledgement. Okay, the San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Romantic alone peoples, where the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that the Romantic Sholoni understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Romantic Sholoni peoples for their enduring commitment to our rep mother earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Romantic Sholoni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As an invited guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives around the community. We recognize respectfully honor Romantic Sholoni peoples we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge and how we care for San Francisco. So for an upcoming program on October 23 at 1pm. We're hosting a dialogue revealing an imperial war in San Francisco. And that will be a dialogue between a big nausea, our Filipino American Center librarian and MC class. And now to introduce Margo note. Margo is a consultant and archivist and has is the author of seven books, including the one we're featuring today, creating family archives, but really excited to have her here. And I have to say, as a working archivist and librarian who has only recently begun to gather my own family, this book to be extremely useful and user friendly. So thank you Margo so much for joining us, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you so much. I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully, everyone can see a creating family archives. I'm really happy to be here this morning to talk about something that's super passionate for me, family archives. So let me just attempt to move my screen here we go. So our focus this morning is thinking about how we preserve memories and experiences. And the question that we asked is what can you do that fills you up and fits your life. A lot of times when I'm talking with people about their personal archives or family archives. They feel overwhelmed. So some of this process that we'll talk about today as well as in my book, really strives to describe how to do archives in a way, kind of step by step, piece by piece. Chunk by chunk to organize it in a way that is accessible and not overwhelming. And the question is, if we don't save it who will. So, taking this power being in and power to organize our materials is both a gift to ourselves but also a gift to other family members that are interested in our history. Everyone has stuff, and it's the stuff that we've created so if you're a creative person you've written letters use collected things over the years. Those are part of your family or personal archives. In addition, there's stuff that you've inherited what I've seen a lot is with kind of the changing generations if your grandparents pass away your parents pass away. Your siblings you then inherit these materials, and then they might be totally organized or they might be kind of totally chaotic. So there's a ton of materials that you might inherit as well that relates to your family history. If you're a genealogist you might have gathered materials over the years so you've gone to historical societies archives, local libraries to gather pieces of your family history. It's part of your research files. So again, this is part of family history that we want to organize. And before we continue I want to define archives just so we're on the same page. So archival material is usually original, meaning it's one of a kind it's love letters that your grandparents wrote to each other that if you were to lose them or they were damaged there's no other way to replace them. It's called enduring value so archvist talk about records of enduring values that means that when something was created. It had one purpose but then it's being kept because that value is enduring so for example, I have a ticket that me and then got one went to city hall to sign our marriage license, and it's like a deli ticket that you would get like in a bakery or a deli. Now that that little ticket served one, one purpose just to make the like a bureaucratic bureaucracy and have to sign faster, but it has enduring value to me because it has romantic value. So it, it, it, its original purpose was a transaction but I'm keeping it in a locket that I have because it has enduring value in this case romantic value archival material or not necessarily old there's a whole cliche about dusty dirty archives and, you know, 100 year old documents which is simply not true, you could be creating something today that would be considered archival, because it has an enduring value so let's say you open, you open up word, you start writing your life history, that could be that could be archival as well. Archival materials also rely on context for meeting so a lot of times, these items themselves don't necessarily, you can like look at a photograph for example, but it's usually a photograph in a group of photographs archivist always think in groups not necessarily an item so we're thinking about groups that have meetings and archival materials can be in any format. Throughout this presentation, I'm most likely going to be talking about documents like physical documents or photographs physical photographs, but I could be talking about maps, data sets journals scrapbooks, 3D objects that you have any type of photograph a digital photograph a daguerreotype, the whole range of materials so, even though I'm using shorthand talking about documents and photographs. It can be in all different types of formats. So family collections are really interesting so in a formal archives like an archival repository there's lots of policies and like collection collection policies and there's all these. There's a workflow that happens when things enter the archives but what's unique about your own archives is that you are the curator the archivist of your collection. So these materials might be only valuable to you. I just gathered over time and kind of an eclectic mix in my book I talk about in my personal archives I have kind of a strange range of things that are very meaningful to me I have a letter from Iggy pop that that he wrote to me when I wrote a fan mail that letter to him when I was 16 this is really important to me. I have a little drawing of him with little antenna like alien antennas. I have a dime that my uncle swallowed when he was a baby that my grandmother found. She has a taped, you know, went through a system she has a taped on a little kind of chipped piece of cardboard that talks about kind of its journey, and that is meaningful to me, even though it's kind of bizarre. And then I have my great grandmother's braids so she had two long braids. When she was elderly, she had to get them cut off for throat surgery so I have them and they look alive they look like they could be my hair. So this is a very interesting and weird mix. And I'm using that as an example just to talk about, you know, everything that you have in your archives is important to you it doesn't have to be meaningful to anyone else. So why organize there's a ton of different reasons why I think right now it's so important that we're talking about family archives is because this is when we think about family bring reminisce. It's kind of family gatherings that are having the holidays Thanksgiving. And we're starting to be more home to be more centered. So you might want to organize things to distribute to family members so if you have a ton of materials and you want to pass on your legacy, you might decide that you want to organize them so that when other relatives receive them they know what they have. What I found is when people pass away and they have family archives that are kind of all over the place. It just looks like a big mess, where if you organize the materials you have them in archival safe boxes which we'll talk about later in this presentation, and they're nicely organized. It tells everyone, Oh, this is, you know, this is important. And it's really a gift to your legacy. So if you have pieces or all of what you have you might be able to sell it if it has historical value. Sometimes, if it's, it does have historical value can donate it to a repository that would make sense. Again, this would be a conversation with the repository. See where it makes sense but then again you'd want to have a little bit of organization to see what you have before you donate. You want to organize things because you want to use it for a project for example if you're writing your memoirs or your family history and make sense to organize those materials first because then you can easily find them as you're writing or organizing. You could also use the materials for an event so I found that things that are milestones like birthdays, anniversaries, the holidays, anything that that gives you a deadline, which is actually very good for getting forgetting you on top of your game to really organize things so you can organize things for a birthday, for example, and also just because the reason that I wrote creating family archives, and I wanted to make it in a publication that you could find on Amazon or your local public library is I really wanted to give people the tools that they that arch this use to work with their own materials. So first things first so if you get nothing out of this presentation. I really want to want you to take this. This next slide to heart. So you want to get materials out of harm's way so that means you're not storing materials and things like sheds garages addicts. So you want to get away from the type of trend transitional place in your home or your apartment. Because that can damage it so you want to get it away from the fluctuations of temperature and humidity away from bugs away from any place that could have, for example, flooding, or any type of damage. It's a basement or attic or wherever you have it. And I always advise to store it in an interior closet, like a bedroom closet this is a perfect area because it's away from windows. It's not necessarily near pipes or any heating or like a washing or drying machine. And so it's kind of safely kept in your home or apartment. I always say when you organize the materials and you, and you put them in archival safe boxes and enclosures that footprint of the materials condenses considerably. So for example when I work with private clients sometimes I go into a living room and there's just like a pile of material it looks humongous and people are thinking, you know, get this out of my house I need to have this organized. So if things are organized that are in let's say three records boxes, that footprint is a lot smaller so again you can easily store it in a place like a closet. I see there's a question in the answer just want to see. Okay. So there's some things that we cannot change the chemical and physical composition so all things turns turned to dust and ash, including ourselves. So we, you know we can't fight against chemistry or physics right, but we can change the way we store and handle them a piece of paper for example, especially let's say a news print is going to be really fragile over time it's going to get brittle it's going to change colors. But if we preserve it in a nice folder in a nice box then we can extend the life of that material. So again we can't really change the physical aspect of things but we can change how we store and handle them. So that prolongs the life of these materials. So handling so I think, you know, in whatever you know 18 months to years of this pandemic. We've all had a crash course and how to wash our hands and the importance of having clean hands. There is this cliche of archivist wearing white cotton gloves and it looks really interesting it looks really cute, but it's really not necessary for for what we're working with. So as long as you have clean hands, without any lotion or oils, you can handle these materials if you're careful. You can have nimble and careful hands the reason that we that I advise not using those white cotton gloves is because it makes you kind of more clumsy it's and sometimes that clumsiness can cause more damage. As when you're working the photographs, for example, you want to hold them by their sides, rather than put your whole hands on them. I remember in a past job I had before I was a consultant. I remember looking at this wonderful photograph this archival photograph and I saw that someone had put their thumb right and on the face of someone in that photograph, and that oil that you know that one little thumbprint was very hard to remove, and it stays there so we have to be mindful of that. So if we're working with fragile materials we want to make sure that we're supporting it, if we're moving them around so let's say we have a very fragile piece of paper you can use a piece of cardboard and you hold the cardboard by its edges and they can move around easily, rather than holding that thing itself. And of course if you have anything that's oversized or heavy you would want to have help with moving it. So you don't damage it and you don't damage yourself. So you want to take stock one take inventory of what you have so I advise. When you're starting a project like this to gather everything together this is also what if you're familiar with Marie condos work about decluttering and finding the joy and the spark of everything she advises this way to. To gather everything together. I suggest putting it on a dining room table if you have one or a card table in a pinch when I've been working on site with clients sometimes all I have is the floor so as long as I put like a blanket on the floor at least I have some surface to work on that's clean. So let's see what do you have, you know, is it mostly documents is it photographs, what are their conditions do you see anything that looks and bad shape. You're really kind of getting a sense of, of everything that you have but you're looking for kind of red flags. So if you see anything that looks like there's been a pass so, you know, dead insects if you see droppings or nibblings of things, or or anything that looks kind of gross and yucky it looks like you know there's been mice or rodents or moths or whatever you what have you want to really take those aside and isolate them. The same thing with mold and mold can can have all different formats it can be black it can be white can be all different colors it can be powdery. Mold is something that you should not mess with it's terrible for your respiratory system. So when you see things like pests and mold you want to put them aside and get experts to work with it. A lot of times you want to isolate those bad materials so that you can work in a healthy manner with what you have. You want to leave repairs the experts now I know this almost seems counter intuitive because if you see something damaged if you see a photograph that's damaged, you want to repair it with tape. But the problem is is an amateur repair causes more harm, I have seen so many beautiful documents that have been marred by tape and like discolored tape tape that damages it even further and looks ugly. It's much better just to have something like a tear already there. The best course of action is to do nothing. And then if you do need a conservator there, I have a website here, cultural heritage.org that has listings of conservators and the different types of materials they work with. So textile photographs, paintings, what what have you, you really want to have things have experts take care of these things, rather than try to do these repairs yourself, whenever I see tape or glue on archival materials it like you know it's a stake through my heart when I see it. So what to keep so this is what in the archives world we call appraisal. So we're looking at what we want to keep, especially if you're working with a ton of large volume of materials that seem completely overwhelming you're looking for things that have things that matter to you, things that matter to your family those things I think will be, I think pretty obvious. You're looking for uniqueness of objects so what is something that cannot be replaced again. Keep in mind, previous slides we talked about archival value having that archive archival value is enduring value. So there's a uniqueness to it it's it's one of a kind it cannot be replaced. It's cards that you wrote when you were traveling Europe as a teenager, they cannot be replaced that you know middle school journal that you had cannot be replaced. If they're informational so sometimes materials can the thing itself might not be important but the information it contains so, for example, for articles, that article itself. If you have that newspaper clipping might be in terrible, you know bad shape. And you can maybe find the scan version online that that has that information you're not really concerned so much with that clipping itself, but the information it contains it says something like an obituary of a great grandparent for example. It's very sentimental things that give you kind of the warm fuzzy feeling that remind you of relatives that have passed or experiences memories that's what you want to keep. I would also suggest keeping things that are interesting things that are really weird that you don't know, you know what to do with so for example, my father served in the Vietnam War in the navy. And he was a very taciturn man and not that much fun at all but for whatever reason he was the entertainment director on this of the USS James town. And so when they would pull into port. Little boats would come and like throw out booklets of drink tickets because I knew that there were sailors on leave that had some money and wanted to go drinking. So there's these really weird like drink ticket books that are colorful and really strange that are part of his collection that I kept just because I find them like completely fascinating. And I would say if you're unsure, put it aside and revisit it later. Sometimes with archival materials they bring up weird feelings I know for me I love looking through childhood photos until I do not and I like had my limit, and I'm in my feelings. And so, if you have those materials that you've gotten from relatives or part of your past that are in some ways, emotional, and you want to get rid of them. I mean, it's funny, I'm an archivist but I'd love getting rid of things to it's kind of strange. I would say just wait and put it aside, you never have to rush to get rid of things or or make these big decisions just leave it aside and then you can always come back to it. But I think when you're looking at what to keep the things that to keep are going to come straight at you it's going to be very obvious and those things that you're kind of neutral on, you can spend some time in deciding. So you want to concentrate on groups so what I said previously is that archivists think about materials as a group so if you have correspondence from a particular period of time that is one group, you don't have to think of things as an item. I think sometimes people get overwhelmed when they think of these things as they think of them all individually rather than thinking them of them as groups and chunks. So you get to decide on the category so you might have correspondence journals that you have scrapbooks, your mother scrapbooks your father scrapbooks, you know these kind of big groupings of materials. And that way, you know when you've kind of taken inventory of what you have, you can go through these groups and then choose to concentrate on organizing that group. You should also ignore duplicates so I see this happen a lot with photographs, back in the day when you go to the photo mad and they're to have those, you know, discounts of you know you can get three copies of this photograph. I find that when people are going through their personal archives they get caught up and getting rid of all the duplicates or organizing the duplicates. And you could do that you could spend your time if you're, if you want to, but the time that spent removing those duplicates doesn't really save you much space and it could be more wisely spent on organizing some of these groups better. And I will explain this in a passage from creating family archives but I do want to talk about two archival concepts. One is the idea idea of promenade so that's a history of ownership. It includes the origin the creation date the description of the materials. And the rule is all records and a group connect to the creator. So for example, if you have things that you've inherited from your father and things that you inherited from your mother you want to keep them. Your father stuff and your mother stuff you don't want to intermingle them, because we get a sense with provenance of, of what those materials are. And again, I will explain this in a passage and shortly. The other archival concept is original order. So keeping records and the same orders when they were created so that could be chronological alphabetical geographical numerical or topical or however you do so. So for example, if you have let's say business records of an uncle, and he organized things chronologically, or somewhat chronologically, you wouldn't take those files and then rearrange them alphabetically. Not only would that be a waste of your time, but it takes away from that idea of the original order so your uncle was thinking about things chronologically. So there's some information that that's kept as part of that original order. So I will go, and I will explain what I mean so I want you to meet grace and Maria. And this is an example of these two archival principles I just talked about. So imagine that you have two collections of recipes, one from your maternal grandmother Grace Chen, who is Chinese American, and one from your paternal grandmother, Maria Mercado who's Puerto Rican. Grace's recipes are written neatly on index cards and organized alphabetically by food groups in a plastic recipe box. Maria's are written in English and Spanish on scrap of paper stuffed in envelopes and organized by the type of dish and by the event. Archimus went intermingled races and Maria's collections and one group called recipes, because the collections should be separated by the creators, examining how each grandmother organizes her group provides knowledge about them. So you want to maintain their order. And Grace has multiple recipes for noodles noting which one is her husband's favorite. She has recipes to create meals for many people which came from growing up in a large family. You can tell that she loves to bake based on the number of recipes for cookies pastries and tarts. Maria's recipes tell a different story she's more interested in organizing her recipes by dish or focus on events is a valuable insight to birthdays call for a special plan and traditional Puerto Rican dishes are reserved for the holidays. Her bilingualism reflects the legacy of the recipes that were passed down to her, and her use of paper scrap show shows how frugal she was having grown up poor. The recipes don't need many ingredients and use inexpensive products her cooking technique is showcased in a recipes with many details. If you combined both collections or decided to organize the collections the same way, you would lose revealing information about your grandmother's. So again, talking about grace and Maria, they have two different approaches to how they have recipes, and if we were going to just put together a collection of, you know, grandma's recipes with both of them, you would lose some of that province and original culture that really helps us give us some information about how they organize and use these recipes. So collections always reflect their creators and we want to preserve that organization, when possible. So, thinking about the order of how to do things, we want to first organize the physical before we digitize. I know, and I totally get it people rushed to digitize things because having things digitize gives kind of better access and you can show that you know share with people. But what I found is that if you don't organize the physical first and you start digitizing, you have a physical mess and a digital mess. It's much better to organize all your physical assets first. Then you'll get a sense of what you have and what really shouldn't be digitized. And then as you digitize it's you're creating a mirrored structure based on that the physical arrangement. So you have a nightly nicely organized physical collection and then a nicely organized digital collection. I also suggest if you have a ton of materials that you're trying to organize to start with paper documents first, because with any type of documents, even if you don't know what they are. You can look at them and read them and figure out what they are. So if you're given a piece of paper, you look at it, you can tell it's a letter and see who is writing to who, the date, the events, the tone of the letter, what's being talked about. So it gives you a lot of information, whereas most images, especially images and personal and family collections, they might not have that information. At least, you know, it's not unless it's written in a caption on the back, for example. So if you've organized the paper stuff first, sometimes you could get a sense of the major players what's been going on. And also, when you look at things like photographs, you have some of that knowledge to help you do the detective work around those photographs. You want to arrange the materials so you're skimming the content, contents you're, of course, maintaining that prominence and original order that we talked about. And thinking about are there labels of the materials, are they accurate. You want to know the formats the date ranges the conditions of what you have, and seeing if there's gaps, or if there's fine. If there's gaps in the documents, maybe another family never has it, or maybe it was lost or maybe it's somewhere else. A great example is my poor brother who's younger than me thought that there was no, there wasn't a lot of baby pictures of him when I never really realized this until recently, because he was looking we were looking at the print photographs. Well, for whatever reason when my brother was born, my father was like obsessed with slides. He had a huge slide, you know, so we saw the gaps with the print photographs, but then he saw it, you know, there are baby pictures of him they're just in slides that we, you know, stored away elsewhere. So again you have to find those, those gaps and those jewels those finds that you'll, you might know about that you found or that are like the jewels of your collection. They remove the bad stuff so things like rubber bands ribbons, their discolor things they ruin the integrity of the object staples and paper clips can rust over time, which is also damaging. The same thing with glue and tape, try to remove these items if you can if it causes. Remove it safely and don't laminate. I think this is more of a trend in the past but lamination basically makes a chemical sandwich where your precious item is in this chemical sandwich and it can't go anywhere and that's the problem to is that lamination is not reversible, which is problematic. So get to good enough. So again so you're not overwhelmed organize good enough so resist the temptation to savor as you're organizing you can always look back. You really want to prioritize so I say you know get a baseline of organization, and then you'll see parts of the collection that you'd like to organize a little further and be realistic just you know, not everyone has all the time in the world to archive their, their family archives, and it can be a little emotional draining at times to organize these materials so so be realistic and be be soft on yourself and trying to organize your family archives. So that's your time so you write down the action steps that you want to do. See how long it takes you to work on a piece of your collection and then course correct so if you know you're spending too much time. Pull back a little bit and use a time management system. I'm a big proponent of what's called the Pomodoro technique or the Pomodoro method, which just means you set a timer for 25 minutes. An interrupted totally concentrating on what you're doing, and then you take a five minute break. And that alone, even if you do, you know, 25 minute bit of organization, maybe every day or a couple times a week. You'll see a lot of progress and what you're doing without getting that overwhelmed or exhausted feeling. Inventory, archvists call this a finding, which, which is a very, very robust inventory of what's there. So it helps with locating items and information. So if I have an inventory of I know that, you know, X, you know, this material is in box a that materials in box B that materials in box C, I don't know what's around the box is especially if I have a large collection, I know by looking at this, this inventory where everything's at so it helps reduce handling, and it gives you what archivists call physical and intellectual control which is sound so awesome so basically what that means is you know what you have and you know where it is. And it's a lifesaver, especially if you're working with a lot of materials, you know that you know I want to look at the photographs from the 70s. And box to, for example, it saves a lot of heartbreak and it really gives you an overview of everything that you have. So what's missing. So, if there's parts of your history or your family history that's missing that's not documented in what you have. Talk to family members. This is a time to really reach out to people and document those stories. I know that when I was a teenager, for example, my grandmother is Lithuanian. And I at least, I'm so thankful I had the mindset to let me write down fanatically those funny Lithuanian sayings that she would say, and I'm so thankful that I did that because she's no longer here and I can't ask her. And that was a lovely kind of legacy that I had so especially if you have older relatives, you want to get their stories so you can talk to them, you can interview relatives formally or informally, and you can also create your own records so you can document your own, own life if you're missing a piece of that archives in the in the documents or the, the stuff that you have you can tell your story and create archival documents as well. So as you're organizing you're looking at supplies. We're looking at boxes folders and loaves and sleeves that can really help us organize and protect what we have. There's vagueness and some of the description of these materials like when something's called archival quality or photo safe. I see this a lot. Let's say on Amazon, those that terminology is kind of meaningless. We're looking for these phrases acid free, which means part of the creation process and take out the acid out of any paper based products, linked in free, meaning that it that part of the paper that that would pull the lignin can be really damaging and so newspapers have a lot of lignin in it so that's why they get brittle and fragile over time and anything that's going to be around photographs we're looking for this phrase photograph activity tests the PAT or path. And that basically means there's a organization that does stress testing of these materials to make sure that they don't damage photographs over the long term. And they pass this test and therefore they're safe to have around photographs storage can be things like vertical for standard size papers like what what we have here this is actually part of my personal archives. If you have things that are oversized or fragile fragile you could have a horizontal box, and I suggest to places so if you have a container store that's local. They have a part of their store, and this is the only store like a national chain that I know of that that has this available. They have a whole section that has some archival material like things for photographs and photo albums. It tends to be a little bit more on the pricey side but if you want to see what these materials look like that's the place to go. I just suggest shopping at gay word archival which is day word calm. They were one of the sponsors of my book. I have an article there about how to get started on your archives. And what I like about them is their customer service is excellent. They've called me when I kind of screwed up orders and said you know did you really mean this size and not that size which is a lifesaver, but they also have a lot of educational materials available available on their website which is really helpful. So digital collections, I've talked mostly about physical artifacts, but we do want to think about digital collections so if you're digitizing materials, either you're doing it yourself or you're hiring the vendor to do it. We want to keep the originals. A lot of times people digitize stuff and they throw out the originals which is horrible. We want to keep that original stuff because if anything happens to those digital files, your history is gone. You want to back up what you've digitized in three places. So in the cloud, in your computer and a hard drive. And again if something should happen, let's say your computer conks out. You still have things in the cloud and a hard drive that you can back up these materials. Digital collections require proactive maintenance and this is a whole other graduate course to talk about digital preservation. But there is some upkeeping with digital files just to make sure they don't get corrupted that their files don't get old. And then when in doubt print it out so for example, I mean this is not. This is obviously something I don't advise organizations with huge archival collections to do. For the home archivist I suggest printing things out. So for example, on my phone, you know I take a ton of photographs I have the digital files backed up. But I also, you know use an app to my local drugstore and I print out those photographs just so I have a physical copy as well. So then I know I have multiple copies everywhere I have physical copies of these digital photographs. And I'm good in case anything happens to those digital files. And this I've kind of had a whirlwind of where we've talked about a lot of things. My book Creating Family Archives, which I believe is available at the San Francisco Public Library. And it's available in all different types of libraries is a great resource and I really created it because I wanted to give people the tools that archivists use in their own home, but I wanted to make it that it was manageable that was it was relatable. So I suggest you can get it out of Amazon, and then I also have a part of my website margonote.com slash creating family archives, or have other resources to talk about creating family archives. I really wanted to give an affordable or free resources to make sure that people are saving their legacy. And that leaves us time for some questions and I did see some questions as they came up. I see someone asks, could you please discuss strategies for dealing with slides, like your brother much of our childhood is in that format. Exactly. I love slides for a variety of reasons. One is that of all the photographic formats that I've seen, people are more likely to write captions on those slides, you know people are necessarily writing captions on print photographs or any type of like older documents. But slides are great because it sometimes captures that information captions and sometimes has dates are very obvious. For slides, they're also what's great about them as well is that they're very affordable to get digitized because of the same format, and you can either do it yourself with a kind of a slide with your scanner. With a home scanner there's a way to put the slides and it can easily digitize it, or if you're going out to and hiring let's say a local digitization vendor, the price per slide is very affordable. So that's what I would suggest for that. And I can also look. Okay, see some more. Donors consider before approaching institutions that might receive collections, great question. So donors should think about. And I've actually helped with my, with some of my private clients where I've working, I've worked through materials and I'm like, Oh, this stuff needs to be in an in an archives. It's an arch making process and seeing what the collection strengths of the archives now. The thing about archives is to maintain archives is extremely expensive. And we want to make sure that the repository has an obligation to protect what's what's most historically important. To be to get a sense of see what you have. And then if you do some research, if you think repository would make sense. So if, if you have something that's related to a specific aspect of World War two, and you find a repository for example, that that does that you would see what their collection is, does it, does it go under the umbrella of what they're looking for. And then you can start a conversation, and they might want to take a look at it. You might have to have if it's valuable, some type of personal property appraisal as part of that process so you can write off that as a donation. And you'd most likely, I would hope that you would sign something called a deed of gift, which says you know these are my materials, I'm giving it to you for safekeeping. These are the legalities of it this is the copyright, you know, all of that, all of that information that's on a page that everyone is on the same page about that donation. So, you know, ask around but be mindful that you know arch this can only take on so many things and it has to be within that collection umbrella that they have. So, thank you for this important presentation my family has boxes and boxes of our father's documents he's a professor in the 50s, 60s and 70s. After we digitize each document and keep them on a computer or hard drive in the cloud what should be done with the paper copies and this for not because I'm finding an archive that wants to print copies. The college he taught it does not have an archive do archives except electronic copies not sure they would want or have space for a lot of boxes. I would take on those digital aspects I would think that they would want the physical. So when I was talking about digitizing you always want to keep the physical because if something should happen, God forbid of those digital copies, you have those physical copies. What else to add. Someone else asked are there resources preserving very old photo formats like daguerre types, etc. So I love daguerre types, which are beautiful, you know the first photo format, I should say I love amber types that that's, but that's like the redheaded child of early photo history in my opinion, but daguerre types are beautiful, but they're extremely fragile due to their nature not only are they old but the materials that they have. So I would look at places like gay word archival or other types of photographic preservation options online to see how you could preserve them a lot of times you would have them and something that would be like a clamshell box. It's very protective of the thing itself so it doesn't it doesn't break apart. There's some padding and there's some, you know, nothing is touching the surface because that can be damaging as well. So, what are your favorite national companies for digitizing sides and videos printing negatives etc. I really don't have favorite national companies there. I know that there's the big one is legacy box. I think that works in a pinch so personally. When I work private clients, I always handle their things or if we get a digitization better they do a career career service to pick it up and drop it off. The thing about these national companies is you have to send the materials to the mail. And for the most part, you know if you're using something like FedEx, I think you're going to be okay but that's still something that makes me a little bit nervous. And I know because they're doing such a high volume, the quality of the digitization like on the age, like VHS tapes are not the best but I think it's workable. So in that aspect, what I would also consider is looking locally in your community to see if you have a local vendor. So sometimes there's mom and pop shops like a framing shop or a camera shop that does this on the side where you can drop off the materials and then pick them up. That, to me, I think is, I mean I always like to support local businesses. I think that makes me more comfortable that, you know, things aren't getting lost in the mail. And you know you can take the risk with things like legacy box I know that a friend of the family digitized all his old tapes from when he was younger and it was awesome to see my, my father at this dinner party where he, you know he's not alive anymore he said something really funny and like that memory was totally recaptured and the quality of the tape, I think was fine. So that was really cool. Do you recommend particular materials for adding captions to photographs like a specific type of pen that will cause additional damage organizing photos. My parents have boxes and duffel bags of photos and ziplocks and otherwise organized only roughly chronologically so for the captions I suggest on the back using pencil on the edge with a very light hand. There are some kind of archival inks that you could use. I'm not a particular fan because I think sometimes they can get smudgy. So yeah pencil on the on the very edge. I also suggest. Maybe this won't make sense for this question because it sounds like there's a large volume of materials. If you have a certain set of photographs for example if you number them. And then on a Word document for example, you know you have these longer captions. That's nice. That's nice to especially if those captions you're finding more information in time. So that original caption might be, you know, family barbecue 1976, where you don't know who's in that barbecue. But as you're working, you recognize okay that's you know Aunt Stella that's cousin Maggie, you know you can start adding information. I have a question okay I have a photo album from late 60s with relatives of my deceased grandmother unnamed and untitled. The photos are in someone's ideal idea of order but the album is one of those self stick with clear page covers. This is probably bad for photos but hasn't taken part the whole album. Any suggestions. Great, great question so that's what's called a magnetic self adhesive album, and they're terrible. They're absolutely terrible because they're not magnetic but they have adhesive so keep in mind adhesive is terrible. So I had something similar. My baby book when I was born was in this magnetic album, and it was arranged so what's awesome about albums or scrapbooks isn't someone if they've done it right, they've organized it in a particular manner that we want to keep that order. So what I did with my album and what I suggest you might do is you can buy a archival album, and it has little photo corners, and it can also go in a like a dust jacket so it has all these layer layers of protection. So what I did is I spent a couple hours in the afternoon, and I recreated that album. So I saw that okay this one page has four pictures of me as a baby, and this order. I recreated it and that safe album and that way I kept that that album organized it gave information, but the photographs are now safe. So in boxes of family photos going back to the 70s how best to organize these some are stuck to sticky photo album pages that were popular years ago is it's safe to remove them and put them in a new photo album can I note the date and people and pen. On the back of the photo I hardly know where to start thank you for your great presentation very helpful. Thank you. Again you want to take them off those sticky photo album pages. If sometimes that adhesive is so old that you can easily just take it off that page about damaging it. If there's a stickiness to it sometimes what helps what helps is having. You can warm up the photograph with a hair dryer so that adhesive gets a little warm, then you take some like floss like wax floss and you can put it behind the photograph and kind of gently wiggle it off the page, and that removes it. I wouldn't suggest putting captions in pen but in pencil that way you can always erase them. And that's a way that you can, you know, preserve those photographs but get them out of that damaging environment. And it's funny, those types of albums are still being sold and it. I go ballistic when I see them in stores. So if you need help interviewing the older generation how do you instructor help or how to get the best results are there guidelines anywhere on how to conduct a family interview. So in on that page the margo note slash creating family archives. I believe I do have some blog posts listed there that have questions to ask your mother your father. Like I think there's 300. 400 questions are these are older posts but they do have a list of questions to ask people. If you look online, you can find a ton of genealogy and oral history sites that give you some conversation starters. There's also. If people don't want to talk and would rather write. There are some kind of cute gift books that you could get like on Amazon that are kind of, you know, but your relative can fill in you know what was it like to grow up at this time, or, you know, what's your first job what was a funny story from your childhood. I would suggest as simple. This is the most the simplest way is that when you're seeing them next, if you, if you're physically seeing them let's say the family event. Take your phone and just do and just have them be recorded and at least that's something, you know, or put them on YouTube like a private YouTube video or, you know, capture that moment it's more about capturing the moment than being, being perfect because there's a lot of resources online about conducting oral histories. The oral history association has a ton of different resources to take a look at that can give you some hints about how to do it very professionally, but but for me it's more about capturing those stories, even if it's on the back of a napkin. Like, when I when I was talking about getting those kind of funny phrases and Lithuanian from my grandmother. She kept every piece of paper to use so back of the envelope I just wrote it down phonetically. And so that that's valuable it's at least capturing it. Do you recommend a photo scanner or what to look for in a scanner with a feeder. I'm tying one that has an automatic feed for speed. So for scanning, I don't have any recommendations for scanners, I think, what's available for the market. They're all, in my opinion, they're all basically the same. Once you start. Once you start getting more into commercial scanners or more expensive scanners then then they get fancier. For the automatic feed, I would only suggest that for materials that can take that beating so if you have contemporary letters that are as well that aren't crumpled that don't have staples or anything you can put it through the feeder for speed. But for anything that's somewhat precious or fragile, you would want the type of scanner that you know the flat bed scanner. Another way that you can approach it, depending on what you have is also to use a camera setup so I have a camera and like this light box that can fold up that looks like a big artist portfolio like a heavy artist portfolio. And so sometimes I've used that for my own stuff or for client stuff to photograph and it does make it a really nice photograph of what you have sometimes the materials that you have can are either weirdly sized for a scanner or odd to scan. So that's some. So I think I'm checking more questions to see if any more coming in. And I see some questions in the chat. So what to look for for a photo scanner. I would say something that's, you want to have at least something that's a letter size or larger, and it really depends on what your price point is. I'm, you know, I'm talking a lot about scanning and photographing, photographing things. Again, if technology is not your strong suit, I would always suggest contacting a local vendor to see if they can do this for you. They can do really high quality scans and they can advise you about what formats you should use. So how do you label digitized photos, if you can find them easily. That's a great question so you're thinking, you're talking about kind of file naming conventions. So for me it really depends on what I'm looking at so with the file names. I like to think especially if it's being organized sometimes I suggest putting that date first. So, and it's the four digit date so you know 1955. You know the full name and I would suggest I do go into details about file formats and how to label things. I would suggest a sort of like, you know, me ma and people you use their real names and in the photographs and then if you have a location so try to think about ways of organizing things so you're getting information in that title, but also when you're talking about files, they are nicely organized so you're not like digging through so I with some projects. I've put the year first and that's helpful. When you talk more about the light box you mentioned yeah I actually have it. Well, if I have it over there. So basically I looked online. It's through Amazon and it looks like. When you fold it up it looks like an artist portfolio so it has a handle and it's like a cube, and then you put it out and it's about. I know this is not helpful, you know to a good amount you know the big black cube with a white interior, and then you can plug it in so it has lights, and it, and it has a white background like a seamless background. You can set things up and then either from the side if you wanted to photograph things from the side, or from the top you're looking down for your whole and then you're photographing the thing itself, and it gives a beautiful image, and I only knew this because I hired someone to do photograph some private collection for me, and she came with it and it was amazing because a lot of what I do with my private clients I mean I have organizational clients as well but with my private clients I'm working people's homes. So it's not like I can really set up a bunch of equipment. So it is really nice and it folds up nicely so it, I mean it is heavy but you can travel with it. And it's really quite amazing for a product. What is it for if they're like selling things on Etsy or eBay, it's a good way to have. It's a good white cube to photograph things in, because you don't get a, you don't see like the scenes of the side. We have one more question. I want to thank you for an incredible. Oh wait I see one more. More something like this. But then I don't see anything else. And if you will I should say you know my emails here if you want to email me. I can open up that link because I don't know if it's going to show. But if you want to email me, I can show you what I got but it looks like exactly looking at that link the Amazon basics portable foldable photo studio that's basically what I had, or what I use and it's very helpful. So, thank you so much Margaret this was incredibly informative, and thank you all for coming to be able to watch recording over and over again on YouTube. And the book is available at the, at the San Francisco public library. It is still in order, and there is to say we've been having some supply issues like many people, but yes we are struggling and will receive it. Yeah, and it's, I think it's only, you know it's available on Amazon day word archival as well there's different places to get it. Definitely. If you like this talk and found it informative there's tons more of information within that book. Thank you again. Thank you. Bye everyone. Take care. Nick will you just hit end. I will hand it and the record. Perfect. Bye bye. Thank you Margaret that was awesome. Take care. Thank you so much. So last hike was hike it was here. She says hello. Oh, nice. Yeah. The last I saw her was in Prague, a bazillion years ago at this great library trip that we went on. Yeah, I was texting with her she mentioned that you guys went to Kootenawara, the ossuary. Yes. And she's a person to go with because she's kind of like, Wonderful. That was the best trip that was so much fun. Yeah. Thanks again for coming really, really appreciated your presentation. Take care.