Scrapbooking: Celebrate Your Family's History

Today's digital photo craze is going to represent a real challenge to future family historians. Like most families, my wife and I are taking more digital photos than ever before. Unfortunately, like most of us, we are preserving fewer than any other generation in the history of photography. And this isn't an isolated problem. Once upon a time, nearly every photo taken resulted in a printed image; now one photo in a hundred (if that many) makes it into print. Vast collections of digital images live and die everyday on computer hard drives, CDs, and a few antique floppy disks. Each of these storage systems is prone to catastrophic failure. Most of us have had home computers for about ten years now, but how many of us still have files left from the first family PC?

Every few months it is a good idea to review the digital photos you've taken and select the best of the best for inclusion in the family archives. Print photos at a local digital processing center or print them out at home with a good ink-jet printer on high quality archival paper.