User:AbbottPD

Tools and Methods for Digitally Capturing Records
Paul D. Abbott, Product Manager abbottpd@familysearch.org Note: For the most up-to-date version of this syllabus, visit

https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/User:AbbottPD

Purpose
The purpose of this session is to review simple but effective tools and methods any family can use for digitally capturing, preserving and sharing family records. We will review some of the latest tools and ideas available today.

CAPTURING IMAGES
Getting artifacts (photos, certificates, newspapers etc.) into a digital format can generally be done in two ways, digital cameras or digital scanners.

The first step in digitally capturing family documents is to understand what kind of documents you are dealing with and what you want to do with them. Are you just interested in capturing old photos to publish to the web or store on DVD’s or do you have old journals, newspaper articles and certificates you want to transcribe and publish to the web? The following should be considered when looking for digitizing solutions:

Questions to be Answered
What am I working with?


 * New digital pictures from family events
 * Scrap books
 * Stacks of existing pictures
 * 35MM negatives or slides
 * Documents: newspapers clippings, books, certificates, drawings

What is the format, condition and type?


 * Bound books
 * Loose pieces of paper
 * Damaged in any way
 * Large newspapers
 * Large scrapbooks
 * Journals
 * 5x7 pictures

Where are the artifacts?


 * Uncle Wayne’s house
 * In the library
 * In a local or remote historical society
 * Grandmother Julia’s house, in Pretoria South Africa

How many artifacts?


 * Hundreds
 * Thousands
 * Tens of thousands
 * Hundreds of thousands

What are you going to do with everything?


 * Organize and Store everything
 * Share images with friends and family
 * Transcribe or OCR the documents to be published

PRESERVING DIGITAL IMAGES
If you were to burn family pictures to a standard DVD and carefully place that DVD it into a safety deposit box, there is a high probability that the many or most of the images will be unreadable within 20 years. On the other hand the original pictures, books and other documents can easily last hundreds of years if a few simple precautions are made. For the most part, long term digital preservation really isn’t that long term, yet. There are new technologies that look really promising, gold DVD’s that can last hundreds of years, but for the most part you will have to plan on systematically refreshing your data by migrating everything to new media every so many years depending on the media you are using.

Preservation Media Options • DVD’s • Tape • Spinning storage, big hard drives • Solid state, SSD drives, thumb drives • Online

If keeping the digital data from magically evaporating into the digital ether isn’t enough, you also have to worry about data formats. In cases where some of the data is lost, some file formats are more forgiving than others. Compressing images to save space but is usually discouraged because of the potential loss of data. Always preserver images in a “lossless” format. Lossless File Formats • JPEG2000 • TIFF • PNG • RAW / DNG

MANAGING AND SHARING DATA
Managing your images by using document management or image management software is critical if you are going to effectively share or publish your data. Scrap-bookers know all about properly identifying images and just like your mother or grandmother used to write important information on the back of old photos, you will need to do the same thing to all your digital images. Most software programs that help you manage your documents or images provide the ability to add information about dates, names, locations, events and other descriptive metadata. Without sufficient descriptive metadata, a large hard drive full of images is about as useless as a box of old unmarked photos. Sharing some or all your data has never been easier. The only thing holding you back is your own imagination. The following are just a few examples of sites and ways to publish your data: • Blogs    o AOL Journals     o WordPress     o TypePad     o Blogger     o Squarespace • Social networking sites     o Facebook     o MySpace     o Bebo     o Freindster     o Orkurt     o Yahoo     o Zorpia • Imaging sharing sites     o Flickr     o Smugmug     o HeyPix     o Buzznet

CONCLUSION
Moving your family information into the digital world can seem really complicated. However, with just a few guidelines, anyone can be up and publishing in no time and at little to no cost.