Lifestyle Zoom: Archiving Family History

Archiving Family History
Two Zoom Sessions
Wed., Apr. 23, 30, 2025, 6:30-8:30 pm MT

Let’s face it, all your family photos aren’t getting any younger. In fact, they’re probably starting to fade and turn yellow. And what about those home movies? You can’t play them because your VHS player is missing in action. When you add up all those photos and home movies, you get years and decades of heart-felt family memories and histories that are at risk of fading away forever. In this course, research and education librarian Beth Blackwood comes to the rescue as she shares all the strategies and solutions to help you preserve your photos and videos, plus the more challenging formats like films and audio recordings. She also covers formats that home archivists can easily preserve and organize such as photos, negatives, letters and other flat documents. By the end of the course, you will gain the knowledge of supplies to store items that are important to your family history and memories; learn the tools that allow you to digitize photos, letters and negatives; recognize trustworthy vendors for digitizing more specialized projects that involve film or audio recordings; understand basic organizational structures and digital storage platforms for the long-term storage of digitized family history collections; and delve into the metadata description so others can find and use your hard work!

Beth Blackwood is a research and education librarian at Duke University and has spent the past decade digitizing and preserving materials of all types. She has digitized collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens and California State University Channel Islands.