Great idea! I signed up and I think I'll make one up for each year. Something like this is good because I tend to forget everything that I've been doing, and its nice to remind myself from time to time just how much fun I've had over the years!

I have used the photo album service at Walmart.com to create two family tree booklets. You can add text and captions and with a bit of work I included some charts. The cost was reasonable and the quality of the booklet is excellent.

Wesley

THE most important thing you can do for "photo preservation" is to LABEL your photos with a bare minimum of data: Photographer, location, and date.

We at the Maryland Rail Heritage Library have tons of stupendous photos that are basically worth about a warm barrel of spit because they aren't labeled or captioned. We also have tons of utterly stupendous photos (and a lot of redundant dreck, too, I might add) that ARE stupendous because someone took the trouble to write down the location and something resembling a date on the back of the print or on the slide mount. And then sometimes we can make an educated guess who the photographer was based on auxiliary information (what box they came out of, who the guy routinely traded with, the initials on the slide mount, etc.). And by now I'm dealing with TWO photographers whose initials were "LWR".

We have one retiree who is spending upwards of 40 hours a week labeling, and occasionally scanning, slides from three different collections besides his own. One of them was a cohort of Dan Dover and "Extra 2200 South," and had perhaps 75,000 locomotive slides, including tens of thousands of industrial and short line locos from across the continent. (Fortunately, most of those slides were labeled well.) We estimate he has about 125,000 slides in his place.

We have two volunteers who come down and spend several hours a week just identifying photo prints and labeling the backs. Several "walking encyclopedia" experts (including yours truly) occasionally have to pass around photos just to identify what we're looking at. Chicago & North Western, Carolina & Northwestern or Cimmaron & North Western? Who has a Louisiana Eastern roster handy? Who had 2-8-8-2's #1 and #3 with a triangle-inside-a-circle logo? Who in Rocky Mount, N.C. had a 4-4-0 #61? Where was the Pearl River Valley Lumber Co. with a 2-8-2 #102? What W&C Ry. sent a 2-6-0 to Southern Iron & Equipment? Did the Hoosac Tunnel & Wilmington pick up a 4-4-0 #14 from Southern Iron? Etc., etc., etc. ad nauseaum...

You shot the photo. You know what the caption is, where you took it, etc. Trust me, twenty or thirty years later, you won't remember those details as clearly as you do now. You're shooting digital now and backing them up on hard drives? Make sure your cameras' EXIF data shows the right dates and times, and make the file and folder names matter.

The differences between a good photographer and a lousy one: A good photographer never shows his/her bad stuff, and s/he makes the good photos both useful and available (not necessarily for free, but...).

This is how I have been labeling Digital photos.

Too many programs strip the EXIF data from the file.

This photographer is easy, he numbered his slides and kept a log.

Something I am trying with the collection, I am currently cataloging, is scanning the slide mounts.

Less stuff on the desk, less chance of damage, don't need a loupe have a zoom function.

-Hudson

Yup, at WRM we have a genius or two who can look at a picture and say "Yeah that's in Oakland on Grove above 55th, at around 5520 Grove St, *tilts picture*, no what am I saying, 5518 of course, and from the streetscape, winter of probably 1921."

There oughta be some way to crowdsource that, so each archive's photos get to the person who'll know the answer best. Time was, you couldn't do that without provisioning each library with a 2400 baud modem and PC. Nowadays all the infrastructure is in place, the only holdup is software.


So I wholeheartedly agree with Sandy... provenance is everything. God bless EXIF data, which can carry all manner of annotations, including yourcomments, dates and times, and most especially, GPS coordinates!!!

That's why, to an archivist, a picture from a phone may actually be more useful than from a $2000 lens. 50 years later, it has accurate GPS data nailed down to within 30 feet. If your camera doesn't have GPS, consider upgrading.

For this very reason, I basically gave up using my camera for most of my survey-railroads photography and switched to using a phone. The phone knows where it is, and I don't remember.


And speaking as a mechanical dept. restorationist, when you stubbed your toe and accidentally shot the bottomside equipment of the car instead of its majestic painted side... I need that photo because we're trying to figure out how in the devil they mounted this piece of apparatus.

Just ask a real archivist about how to really preserve your photos.
Almost all color film has a limited life. It'll eventually be a blank image someday. Storing them prolongs that, though.
Cheap books is not preservation at all. The bindings fail quickly, and the paper won't last the generations.
I once talked with someone at the Library of Congress and she said there'll be a giant gap in information about life from the 60s until God-knows-when because most of the info is on media that won't last. There'll eventually almost no color photos, very little film, and digital media has proven to be a dead-end for long term preservation as well. Most books are printed on paper that won't last, with bindings that don't even last the lifetime of the first owner.
She said that someone, say 200 years from now, will be yelling at us for putting all our info on media that was cheap and by their time, nothing will be left for them to know anything about us. It's sort of chilling to know that.
To make something last, it costs money that nobody is willing to spend.

That's "cheap" books. And magazines. Insofar as bindings, etc., I've seen it all: books that were handled like the stereotype "million-dollar comic book" where one crease or smudge takes 80% off its purported value, to books that were used to near-death. I've seen highly collectible, important rail books that fall apart if you look at them funny, and certain other books that seem bulletproof.

We archivists can usually tell which books are most useful and which books just look pretty. The useful books are worn, heavily used, and sometimes falling apart; the ones that just look pretty are in mint condition.

"the paper won't last the generations"? I have railroad books and journals dating back to 1839 that I could offer as contradictory evidence.



There's a flip side to this admittedly cynical point of view: It is now so much cheaper, easier, and more efficient to TAKE/MAKE the photographs AND duplicate and disseminate them that there are potentially 25,000 times more photographs out there to preserve. Now, granted, 99.9% of them won't be conscientiously preserved in any manner, but that still leaves you with 25 times more photo opportunities to sort through. Some of them will even be good.

Also, you can go on and on about how hard copies are so much more stable and longer-lasting than the digital shots of today, but the fact remains that you only need one well-directed act of terror, one accident, one flood, one fire, etc. to destroy millions of man-hours of photographic work, if it's all in one place. Duplicate, back up, disperse, share (within reason).

The point of that LoC person should be taken somewhat seriously, but if one proactively approaches that possibility (the real job of archivists), that gap won't exist, or at least be surmountable.

The retiree I mentioned earlier also routinely searches RailPictures.net, RRPictureArchive.net, and similar sites, and downloads any photographs that are posted that are relevant to Maryland railroading and the immediate surrounding area, cataloging them and saving them to external hard drives. At least someone is doing so..... and not to sell them as collections on eBay later, either.

Since the first post in this thread I have been working on photobooks of the Tod Engine project, one for each year since 2004. I have thousands of photos documenting every step along the way, but even I don't look at them often as they are buried in computer files and on hard drives and it is difficult to show them to visitors. The photo books are a great way to show how we got to where we are to an interested visitors.

I have a great deal of color books, publications and advertising literature that go back decades. When am I supposed to start expecting this stuff to degrade as the people from the LOC predict? I think printed matter will not have a problem lasting over the long term if its handled in the same manner all archival matter is handled. Keep the humidity low, temperature constant and the UV rays away.

I was referring to many of the books published since the 1960s and today in my post and said as such. Of course, paper from much earlier will be around for a long time. I have a lot of WW2-era paperwork that looks almost as good as the day it was printed.

We're talking about railroad books here. I couldn't care less about a bazillion copies of What Color Is Your Parachute?, Megatrends, The DaVinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Garfield Super Treasury, and the Oprah Book Club selections. Many of the books we're dealing with have total press runs of 5,000 or less (sometimes far less--one of my most used books is #390 of 400), and are bloody unlikely to end up with Kindle/e-book editions or scanned to Google Books. And with a scant few exceptions, most of the rail books I've seen of late are published on high-quality, or even archival, paper.

Now Official Guides and Railroad Magazines, that's another story......

Leave the sociologists, musicologists, and the like to worry about People Magazine, Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy, and Stephen Ambrose. Focus, people, focus.

Indeed, we are. That's what I've been talking about all along... Well, you think they are, anyway. I would have agreed with you a few years ago. And some actually are, in all fairness. Many are not. A friend who handles collections for a large (non-RR-related) archive once came over and looked through my book collection and pointed out how many supposed "archive quality" books are in fact not at all. Bindings have gotten cheaper over the years, too and even if (and it's a mighty big 'if') the paper is good, the pages may likely fall out after 10-20 years, even in high-end books you wouldn't expect. It was quite an eye-opener for me to hear that.
More surprising was to find that many documents and books made before the 1960s and 70s that never needed to last very long will, in fact, outlast many of our high end books by several generations.

Look, we all have to compromise between what's possible versus what's practical, whether it be books, photos, drawings, or pieces of rolling stock. As is the popular refrain around these parts from the old heads, "You can't save 'em all."

I'd love it if every railroad had a nice, archivally-printed history and photo album compiled on it. (Having recently had to do research on a few lines where I have yet to discover even a competent periodical article written on them, I really want this.) And each of these books would cost $150-200, and have a total sales run of maybe twenty at best. Meanwhile, the latest compilation of O. Winston Link's photography, complete with a CD of unreleased audio recordings of his, is available discounted at Amazon for $26.40, free shipping.

Archivists are paid to tell you how to make things last, and sometimes to pass judgement on which things to make last. If we listen to the archivists, that Link book should be printed on acid-free paper (my copy doesn't specifically say it is), and that the CD should be a gold CD that won't deteriorate over time. Of course, we've just taken that $40 book and made it a $90 book discounted to $75, and made Link even more of an "unheard-of" photographer than he was.....

We're already struggling with the fact that railroading suffers from a relative lack of popularity and interest compared to autos, boats, etc. The last thing we need to do is make it even more expensive and "niche" an avocation or interest. "Mass market" has its place, and it's not just the Atkins diet or the latest "Fifty Shades of Grey" book.

One archive with which I work has had to start doing what would have been utterly unthinkable for them a decade or two ago: "weeding" books and other holdings that their archivists have deemed are simply not relevant or useful to the archive's mission. To put this into a railroad analogy, they used to keep every railroad book and magazine they would get, including model and foreign books and publications. They've simply run out of room, and realized that the crowded shelves made practical research increasingly difficult, if not impossible. They have no choice--the shelves are full, and no one's stepping up with a million-dollar check to build them a new library building in this economy. So they have to carry out massive attrition--again, if it were a rail library, they'd be getting rid of the "discount coffee table" books cranked out cheaply with minimal research, the "how to build a model railroad" books full of technology rendered obsolete by modern electronics and DCC, the Lionel price guides, the "pretty picture" books by the likes of Beebe & Clegg and Don Ball, the Trains and Model Railroader magazines now available on DVD, books on the trains of Australia, and that compulsive need to have every last copy of the Official Guide possible.

This is going to happen with more and more libraries and archives. Do we need a 3/4 roster shot of every darned locomotive, trolley, bus, and whatnot on every railroad/transit agency? And to what end? Is there someone who is absolutely, positively, desperately going to need a photo of PD&Q 8484, and can't make do with sister 8486? Yes, it'd be nice if the PRRT&HS had a photo of every last PRR station, and could produce a photo of that particular one for me--oh, no, wait, I want a photo with the local freight going by. Yeah, maybe that photo sits with a dealer in Arizona, or in a post card collection in New Hampshire, or in an attic in Indiana.

Sometimes, the quality of the paper is the bloody least of my worries. I'm more ticked off that I've had to go out and find, for public and public-access libraries and historical societies, utterly definitive books on their local rail lines that they not only didn't have even in some reserve collection, but had no clue even existed for them to acquire. (Just five days ago I found two copies of yet another one online at a bargain price at Amazon--low two figures rather than the three figures it had been at--and notified a friend in that territory; he snapped up both copies, one for himself and the other for the local historical society.)

Boy, you guys sure loooooove your dead trees.

It's really funny, OP had a bunch of digital pictures, but didn't consider the pictures "preserved" (or even real) until a small sampling is printed on paper, at great expense, I would note.

Whereas I don't consider them preserved until they're ALL in a digital archive. For next to free, since I'm going to own a computer and backup facilities in any case.


Hard drive is cheap.

Specifically: it's getting cheaper, faster than you can fill it.


You know how archivists say "if it's misfiled, it is effectively lost to the collection"? Well, if it takes four hours to find it, it is also effectively lost to the collection.

And when you sit down and take stock of a realistic and viable solution to this problem, only one answer emerges.

In fact when you sit down and contemplate a realistic and viable solution to any number of archiving problems, only one answer emerges and it's the same answer. And yeah it's work, but dear God look at the alternative. And I'm sorry, I'm taking for granted relatively new technology which you may dismiss as a curiosity, but I see as the center of everything because I work in that world. Really seriously. You thought Gutenberg was a big deal? No disrespect, but this is at least 10 times bigger in terms of its practical impact to the information business.

Each paper book is two things in one. There's the knowledge, and then, there's the artifact. Each deserves wildly different types of treatment. The artifact, obviously, should be treated like an artifact. The knowledge should be made accessible to your constituency in the richest ways practicable. (consistent with law, and library law has wildly evolved in recent years, specifically to allow rich use of knowledge, e.g. search.) Because with newer technologies, that constituency can and will analyze, mix and mash that data in ways we cannot imagine.

Now, are you an artifact hoarder, or a knowledge deejay? These philosophies are mutually incompatible, because any archivist will ALWAYS have loyalty to one over the other, and each philosophy is too invasive to the other's "territory" to be permissible. The artifact hoarder secretly thinks a book's value is proportionate to its exclusivity, and does not want his book reduced to the status of mere artifact, he does not want its "soul" "stolen" by the scanner, because once it's scanned, no one will ever pull it from the shelf again. He will naysay it with obsolete statements about copyright law. He will claim the scanning process will injure the book. The knowledge deejay thinks scanning a book is the best use any copy of that book has ever had, because it makes the book relevant to a wide constituency who can now make uses of it that scarcely be imagined, least of all by an archivist stuck in 1950 thinking.

I will discretely inform Brother Lisowski that legends have been spun about a certain character that used to be a constant (some would say persistent) presence on board certain Northeastern excursions. The trademark signifier was his badly-dogeared collection of perhaps-now-historic photos of steam excursions over the years, which he would pull out of his pocket and begin showing you while telling you the stories behind them, with the devout dedication of a Jehovah's Witness pit bull ready to chew off your thigh if you didn't join in his "Watchtower" reading club. Oh, the guy was polite and inoffensive enough (save for body odor), but bloody persistent.

We beg of you: Don't. Be. This. Guy.


If you want to show "someone" your photos in an organized and useful fashion, you assemble a slide show, video presentation, or multimedia extravaganza. Or write a book or booklet. Or do performance art. Whatever.

In a not-too-long-ago issue of Classic Trains, J. David Ingles recounted the tale of bailing from Amtrak's Panama Limited in 1972 en route to the 1972 NRHS Convention in New Orleans, and two of them running to the airport and catching Delta flights to New Orleans. Meanwhile, the wives and several other members of the Northwest Illinois Chapter had to stay on board to "baby-sit" several projectors, stacks of Kodak carousels, a fade-dissolve unit, tape decks, and the like amounting to several large crateloads.

A couple years ago I invited one of the participants in that convention's shows, Mel Patrick, out to my neck of the woods to give a show. He had to decline, but mailed a computer CD with THREE of his programs, including the classic "Chicago Union Station" show, all loaded on it for presentation instead. The cost, between CD and mailing, was less than five bucks. It blew everyone away.

I've given a presentation on the "Ghost Railroads of Central Arizona"--a medley of maps, historical photos, and modern photos, all placing said railroads into historical and current context--to several groups now. Provided they have the digital projector, I need at worst the laptop I'd have with me anyway, and at best a 4-gig USB thumb drive. No slide trays gathering dust on the slides, no slides jamming or burning out from the light, no photos getting damp and sticking together irretrievably....... and a much snazzier and interesting program than "what railfanning I did on my summer vacation" shows.

I did one show for an NRHS chapter where, on the spur of the moment that evening, I said "Well, I can show the show on ghost lines of Arizona, I can show this stack of modern photos of my home turf, or I can show you this bunch of vintage photo scans from our Chapter's collection..." All on one thumb drive. We were there until we were thrown out by the hotel.

"By carrying around a thumb drive?" Yes to the Heck.