I have been involved in creating electronic and book format versions of the many pictures in our various family albums for some two years now. This is proving a non-trivial task.

For one, the source content is, at best, poorly organized. Quality of the original pictures, which go back over one hundred years in some cases (one hundred years!) varies from wonderful to execrable, and some of the old albums need to be carefully unbound before scanning.

I’m not exactly sure how this started. I suspect that my mother’s death in early 2003 at the age of 88 was a driving force, confronting me with the reality of the impermanence of memory and the rapid passage of time. Add my son’s birth a year before mother’s death and the whole project assumed a sense of urgency and haste. It is no small hindrance that on my side of the family the prime link to the past, the Rosetta Stone, if you like, which can put life in those old pictures, is my eldest sister who, at 65, is some 12 years my senior. She knows the pictures better than anyone, being especially well versed in the pre-WWII ones. How all of this survived WWII not to mention any number of subsequent relocations as my parents became refugees from their native Poland, is not so much a mystery as a miracle.

For the past couple of years I have been unwrapping, disassembling, scanning, reassembling and returning a host of albums, not to mention many loose pictures.

The final tally is some 300 pictures.

As our audiences for the results vary in technological sophistication, it became clear early on that three variants of the output would be called for:

1 – A traditional web site, available to anyone with an Internet connection

2 – A CD or DVD that can be mailed to anyone willing to use a computer but without an Internet connection (don’t laugh, most of the world still lacks one)

3 – A book, not just for the techno-agnostic, but because it’s still the nicest way of relaxing with printed materials of any sort. Ever try to read your computer in the bath?

Now I’m at the point where everything is scanned, retouched and otherwise mended in Photoshop, and neatly stored in Apple’s wonderful iPhoto awaiting final agreement on order and narrative details.

Of course, it occurs to me that one hundred years hence, the DVD or CD will no longer work in anything on the market, the web ISP will likely have gone bankrupt and the book will have long curled up and yellowed. At least some succeeding generation can then rescan the book and start all over again.