Digital Concerns

To celebrate Preservation Week, I’ll be offering three blog entries this week that offer a personal perspective on some general preservation issues.  This is the third.

Dennis Pelley, the husband of my sister Jamie, died a year ago this week.  For the memorial services (and as a gift for his many friends and family members), Jamie made a beautiful Windows Moviemaker presentation that celebrated his life through family photographs and a soundtrack of some of the meaningful songs of his life.

Jamie saved the presentation on a bunch of DVDs.  A year later, some of the DVDs work fine but others refuse to play on any of our computers.  Some work on certain computers but not others.  Jamie wants me to investigate this situation because she wants some assurance that this particular family item can be preserved.  (This isn’t the blog entry that she’s requested.  I will get to it but not yet.  This is just an expression of concern.)

The digital world worries me.  So many people have digitized their photos, movies, and tapes with the expectation that these meaningful items will endure in their new formats.  But all I see are software programs becoming obsolete at a rapid pace and popular new formats quickly replacing old ones in the marketplace.  It wasn’t all that long ago that we transferred some old 8mm family films to video.  Now we no longer have a working VCR to play them on.

I have photographs from 100 years ago that beautifully evoke a very different time and a much slower pace.  All I have to do is take them out and look at them.  Meanwhile Jamie has a DVD of photograph images that won’t play on any of our computers.  It’s just a disk with a label scribbled by a Sharpie.  In just one year, the content is already inaccessible.

© 2011 Lee Price

The Dinosaur Murals

To celebrate Preservation Week, I’ll be offering three blog entries this week that offer a personal perspective on some general preservation issues.  This is the second.

Ever since I posted the Stylish Blogger Award entry, I’ve been thinking about the dinosaur murals.

In the mid-1960s, my family moved into a new house on Leo’s Lane in Southampton, NY.  I was only four or five at the time but already in the grips of a dinosaur obsession that, truthfully, exists to this day.  At that time, my favorite book was a Giant Golden Book called Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles by Jane Werner Watson.  The magnificent color illustrations were by Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Rudolph F. Zallinger.

Inspired by the book’s pictures, my father painted large murals of dinosaurs on the concrete walls of our basement.  He created these murals soon after we moved into the house and they were still there when the house was sold in the 1980s.

During the twenty years we lived in the house, we took hundreds of photographs.  Earlier this year, I went through every single one of those photos and didn’t find a single one that included the dinosaur murals – not even visible in the distant background of a shot.

It’s only natural to take pictures of the big events – the birthdays, weddings, parties, and vacation.  But forty years later, these aren’t necessarily the things that matter most.

Fast forward forty years from now…  At some future point, someone will look back with nostalgia at our lives.  And they won’t just be interested in those splashy special occasions.  They’ll have realized that the ordinary times were special, too.  I wish we had pictures of the trees in my grandparents’ backyard in Riverhead, of my grandfather’s basement workshop in Southampton, and of my childhood bedroom (with its Aurora monster models, the King Kong poster on the wall, and microscopes and chemistry sets strewn across the desk).

I’m glad I have my memories of the dinosaur murals, but, above all, I wish I had one single Polaroid of them.

© 2011 Lee Price

Focusing on Photographs

Happy Preservation Week!  Officially, Preservation Week 2011 begins this Sunday, but why not start planning your Preservation Week schedule now?

Here in Philadelphia, the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts is presenting a free program:

"Focusing on Photographs:  Preserving Your Family Legacy"

This program will be offered on Tuesday, April 26, at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 3420 Walnut Street.  If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP to Abby Eron at 215-545-0613.  (And please bring a photo ID because it’s required for access to the library.)

Barbara Lemmen, CCAHA Senior
Photograph Conservator.

Presenter Barbara Lemmen is a star at “Preserving a Family Collection.”  She helped me with the blog series on preserving photo albums, which included the single most popular entry we’ve ever run:  “The Magnetic Photo Album.”  Barb is Senior Photograph Conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts.

Focusing on Photographs will cover the preservation of photographic materials from 19th century daguerreotypes to contemporary digital images, with helpful tips on how to handle, store, and display your photographs.  There will be time to view samples of various photographic processes as well as to inspect currently available storage systems.

This program is just one activity among dozens that will take place in all regions of the United States during Preservation Week.  Check out this handy Google map for preservation activities near you.

Pass it on.  (Note:  “Pass it on” is the official slogan for this year’s Preservation Week activities.)

© 2011 Lee Price