Digital Archives
See Our Projects
Our Mission at SaveOurLegacy.net is to help transition organizational, cultural, and personal histories to the digital medium for researchers, present and future.
If we do not actively preserve our past, much of it will be either lost or at best, unaccessible to future researchers. Gutenberg.org has for years been digitizing public domain works. Libraries and entities such as Google are working fast and hard to preserve the major literary, business, and science publications. They know that what is not digitized will not make the transition into the future.
Consider the advent of the printing press. If monks had not slowly, persistently preserved the information from the oral tradition into a written form, then none would have made the transition to mass dissemination by the printing press. We lost much accumulated knowledge from the oral tradition, but we saved some.
Today, we are in the same situation. What does not get digitized and uploaded to the Web or saved to external drives will be lost.
Our goal at Save Our Legacy.net is to focus on digitizing what seems overlooked:
1. Organizations of all types, large and small, have worked to make a difference for decades. What they did and and how they did it will be important for future researchers, if they can find documents, pictures, films, and audios recording the organizations' activities.
2. By studying personal documents, letters, photographs, music, and momentos, future researchers may analyze and draw conclusions about life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and before. Studying everyday life is crucial for understanding a culture.
3. Most families have personal albums, films, records (wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, 331/3s), tapes, and other momentos passed to one member of the family to safeguard. Some family members have boxes and boxes, representing two and three generations. That is how we have been doing it . However, more and more of those albums and boxes are disappearing. Perhaps, they are lost in a fire, or a flood, or they deteriorate over the years. Perhaps, the family member simply does not value them, tires of moving them, or has limited space, and sets them at the curb for trash pickup.
If each of us prioritizes and digitizes what we can, copies can pass to the future on external backups or uploaded to the Web. The more copies distributed, the greater the chance of preservation.
Please look at our preservation efforts. All of the projects are works in process, but some are farther along than others.
If we can help you in your efforts, we will. Contact us.
Help References
Check out these links for help and information:Library of Congress: Personal Archiving
for all levels of archivists:
a thorough how-to collection of articles
Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Free digitization your Texas-related films and vieos in exchange for the donation of a digital copy to texasarchive.org.
Home Media Preservation Guide
safe home storage of videos and films from Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Copyright and Licensing Issues for Digital Preservation
for all levels of archivists:
If you plan to sell your digital collection, know the law.
National Archives and Records Administration Guidelines
for advanced archivists:
the latest guidelines for developing online archives