Photographs and preservation

One of my projects lately has been organizing my photographs into something like archivally-correct order (this one is one of Dad's from Vietnam). I keep telling myself that I've processed collections that were in a far more advanced state of chaos, but it's somewhat disheartening to know that, despite those degrees certifying me as an organizationally advanced sort of person, my own papers and photographs and other odds and ends are just as horrifyingly jumbled as they were before I racked up all those student loans.

In the process, I've been rehousing photos in inert plastic sleeves and putting them all in archival-type binders and storing them in acid free boxes and so on. Some of them are beyond help, at this point, but at least I'm making the effort. Oddly enough, a lot of Dad's photos and a bunch of my grandparents' are in better shape than the ones I've taken. Obviously the quality of photographic prints is degenerating, like everything else these days.

The thing that really shocked me, though, was that there are a couple of major events of which I don't have a single photograph. Not one. Because I was happily lugging around the digital camera and thinking something along the lines of "this will make it so much easier to upload the pictures to the flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/14607479@N00/) or the website (http://www.blueridgepackards.org)." And the result is that I have a hundred images on my hard drive and not a single print. Now, this is despite the fact that I know just how much of an oxymoron the term "digital preservation" is - even with all that training and even though I have spent plenty of time fighting to retrieve old files from the old laptop or a floppy or even a CD-ROM. It makes me wonder: what chance do we have of preserving an archive of images of life in the twenty-first century when even the trained professionals can't do any better than this?

From now on I'm carrying the film camera, and I'll drag out the scanner for those things that need to go online.