Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol.

I'm the proud father of 24 year old Grant Socol, a Texas A&M political science graduate from the class of 2023.

And my personal anxiety actually fueled today's topic.

I am a Gen Xer who has a ton of hard copy photos and letters and other mementos that mean a lot to me.

And some of those things date back 100 years or more from my family that emigrated here from Eastern Europe and even some from my late father.

Those things are special to me, but Grant has not yet shown a ton of sentimentality toward them, and he's also from a digital first generation.

So my concern is this.

Grant is not going to want to inherit boxes of photos and letters and trinkets from his ancestors.

So how do I preserve these things so Grant can have them for himself and his future family?

And more importantly, I shudder at the thought of actually having to throw away some of these old things, these beautiful old items.

So what in the world am I supposed to do?

This is my personal therapy session.

Thankfully, help is here not just for me, but for all of us who need a little bit of hand-holding, even with physical items and maybe digital representations of them.

So with me today is Krista Oldham, director of University archives at Texas A&M, and Sean Buckner, director of Preservation at A&M.

Thank you both for being here.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

So let's do this real quickly.

Let's start with you, Krista.

Where are you from?

Your path to Texas A&M University.

And when did you decide as a child that being an archivist was for you?

So I'm originally from Denver, Colorado.

So not a native Texan or Texan, but did come here in about the fifth grade.

So grew up here, did not have an idea that I was going to be a librarian or in the library world.

I thought I was going to be a historian.

I picked up the history bug from my dad, who was a big world, were two, but so really appreciated history that I was going to be a history professor and went to school with that intent.

And it wasn't until I'm in a Ph.D.

program where I said, I don't I don't enjoy this what I'm doing anymore.

I really liked what I am doing, which was working in an archive.

I was working at Archive as a part time job and I really appreciated getting to preserve materials, arrange them for individual and have those be accessible for folks.

And so started to pursue a got another master's degree in information science to continue that work and and I circled back to Texas I my first job professional job after I got my degree to be in archivist was up in Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia.

And then I traveled down to Clemson, South Carolina, and worked there for a few years.

And then A&M gave me a call and said, Hey, we'd like you to consider this job here.

And it was a great opportunity to to come back and be closer to family.

But also to be part of an institution that really cared a lot about its university's history and had a really strong kind of almost, you know, a visceral attachment to its history, the objects that make up Texas A&M.

And so that's that's how I got here.

That's an interesting path.

Sean, what about you?

I came to A&M about ten years ago.

No, I'm I'm from the Mountain States, so also lived a little time in Colorado, but mostly Utah, some California, Oregon, New Mexico.

So the mountain states.

I was a I joined the military.

I served 20 years in the Army National Guard as a linguist.

The military intelligence and intelligence is just information.

So later at a point, I decided to go back to school after a few degrees in linguistics and studied information, which basically library libraries are information managers.

So for a short time at the University of Utah before coming here with my wife to a appointment here at A&M.

So I've been here since then about ten years ago.

Okay.

So the anxieties and concerns that I expressed are those unique or do you hear that sort of thing in some version or another?

Fairly often I think I think we definitely hear pretty often there's a lot of guilt when somebody has inherited kind of like that family history or that family legacy.

Yeah, because there's so much emotion and and pride attached to physical objects, maybe even digital objects as well.

And so I think it's a pretty common sentiment that we hear from folks that call us to say, I have my grandparents yearbooks.

Is this something that you want?

I have so-and-so's letters.

I don't know what to do with them.

I you know, I feel like they should go somewhere.

They have some importance, but I just I really don't know what to do with them.

But are they looking like Krista, please take these off of my hands or are they really saying I want to hang on to them, but I don't exactly know how to do that?

I think there's a little bit of both.

We do tend to get both.

Sean probably deals more with the people that are I have stuff in, I want to preserve them.

How do I do that?

And a lot of times folks will contact me because they want to give to the university.

But we definitely, I think, have a good balance of having materials that somebody wants to offload to an archive to preserve in perpetuity, but also to seek information, seek guidance on how can I best take care of these materials that I have so I can keep them for my family?

Definitely.

So you guys do this professionally for an institution, but when you get down to the family level or individual level, how should we approach that?

That's a good question because lots of times it's easy to apply things in a work setting and it's a lot harder to apply it in your personal life with with the various the myriad of formats and media that we have stored.

So your scenario was a really good one in that, you know, how do you what do you do with these with these physical items?

And as a preservation director, preservation, we want to take care of everything we have.

We were worried about being lost or or no longer, you know, maybe even the worst case scenario being thrown away.

Yes.

So we I deal in both in digital and the physical realm, Like there are digital items that we need to preserve just as well as physical items that we need to preserve.

And sometimes we need to digitize physical things to make them more accessible through digital means.

But we we don't try to get rid of those things.

We want to keep them because there's not one that's better than the other necessarily, Right?

It's not better.

The physical isn't necessarily better than the digital just There are benefits and disadvantages to each of those, but we need to give them an optimal environment in which to be preserved and that keep for the long term.

Yeah.

Did you want to maybe walk us through some basic terminology that that you guys use every day, but we may not be as familiar with?

Sure.

This is I think I just mentioned a few like media like that.

What what's the the form of the item?

What's it is it a is it a bound paper book or is it some papers?

Or you can have optical media or like CD-ROMs, Some people have analog medias, which are like VHS is and audio tapes and all this type of reel-to-reel tape.

So there are different media, we can call them formats too.

But generally we kind of refer to digital as the various formats that you have different types of digital content.

You know, sometimes you want to, you know, certain formats require certain softwares or the larger and so media formats are important.

One term that we use a lot is born digital.

I think your example of your son were photographs born digital, meaning there were never was a physical copy just originated as a digital item.

Yeah.

So taking care of those also has it, you know, digitized or digital born digital content is it has its own set of requirements on how to take care of it and so forth or some other terms.

I guess a collection we talk about collections that we use a lot.

Obviously in Krista's wheelhouse, there are special collections, archival collections, but a collection isn't just a gathering of things are collections.

When you put a little effort into making it informative and having some of that, some description and some context or some other terms that maybe I think you cover good enough.

Well, I know from a technology standpoint how many of us are guilty of this.

So my wedding video is on VHS, and at the time you're probably thinking that's going to be good for ever.

And then along comes, DVDs and CD ROM and things like that.

And if, if you don't start migrating to that and then migrating to jump drives and passport drives and things like that, and then you don't continue it on into cloud store, like you get so stuck with generations past technology that suddenly it becomes almost impossible to actually retrieve that stuff.

I Yes, that's part of my anxiety.

Can you tell that's what we call obsolescence?

Yes.

So help me.

Perfect.

What?

Yeah, I'll just say what you're speaking of is what we call obsolescence.

When those media that you just mentioned become too old, either they degrade themselves or that we don't have the technology at least not accessible to us anymore.

Yeah, to access setting on.

Do you have any floppy disks in your house.

I've I've managed to get rid of those.

Exactly.

So, so yeah.

So there's just so many different media we use in the past that just over time, either they're not as viable physically anymore or just don't have a way to access that content.

So the reformatting is one of the things you talked about migrating, but that, you know, that's kind of reformatting it into a new format.

And new media is what we do a lot in preservation to, to make it accessible while, you know so you don't have to go always to that old VHS player to be able to see that VHS tape but make it a digital version we can keep for or they're healthy practices that we should be employing as individuals and families to every few years migrate to the next big thing.

Krista How do we approach that?

Yeah, and I'll probably kick this to Sean because this is in his wheelhouse with having a really strong background in digital preservation.

But that definitely is something that we encourage folks to kind of continue to monitor the technology, checking your item and seeing if you can play it back because it can go pretty quickly.

And so I'll let I'll let Sean tell us about the reformatting formatting.

Yeah.

So we don't necessarily want to get rid of the older items we've talked about as preserving those because in the future there may be a need to go back to it.

And with a new technology, do a new reformatting.

So we want to keep those old things.

But when it comes to reformatting or mirroring those two new media, it's a it's a it's a big it's a big task.

And there's a lot a lot involved.

Different types of formats, different types of digital media.

But really what it comes down to is just that I think you said something to the effect of putting in that time and effort to actually take care of your your items, whether that's migrating to new a new, new formats, new new storage spaces.

Yeah.

And so one thing we need to really, I think is key is that digital is actually more fragile than the physical.

That's much easier to lose your digital content than it is to lose your physical content.

What do you mean by that?

So we talked to the already a little bit about obsolescence of some of the old media can either just become too old or degrade, be destroyed.

So with with digital media, with digital format.

So it's it's so much easier to to lose it because the the floppy disk or tape or anything that we have can sorry a lot of the confusion myself but it's easy that digital content we have stored on those media can can degrade quickly.

Yeah we can lose it.

On top of that you have just the operating systems and the computer storage space.

We need to to be able to access the softwares, change licenses, all these things that give us access to this content can change and evolve over time.

And then the worst of it all is actually human error, what I call human error or neglect.

When you just don't take care of those digital files, you start paying the bill for your Google Drive or whatever it is we have stored, or you can actually delete things.

You can just store lots of photographs in the folder and don't even know what you have in there.

And so over the years you're like, Where was that photo from 1995 and right outside the Vatican?

Where do I find that?

Like I remember that picture, but I don't if I didn't put the effort into giving it some context or naming conventions of those digital files and essentially it's lost, I can't find I don't know where it is.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of ways that digital the fragility of digital content is that yeah, that we lose it so easily when I just think the ubiquity in which we have digital content everywhere, like Sean was talking about of we we think of how many photos you have on your phone.

I have about 10,000 photos on my phone.

They're not organized in any folder because they're really quick and easy for me to take and that loses context and that that is an easy gateway to lose that contact because I don't know what I have.

It's not the same as, you know, you've gone and you printed photographs off from the Kodak Walgreens store that that has some context around it.

You have just all these digital files that you haven't curated in any sort of way.

You haven't associated any sort of meaning with because it's so easy to take how am I sitting in front of an archivist who has 10,000 photos that aren't organized in a in any particular way?

Human nature?

Yeah, human nature.

But does that grate on you like, this is annoying me.

So does it.

Does I kind of feel like the cobbler has no cobbler's children have no shoes.

I am a fraud.

I do as I say, not as I do.

But I do have my digital junk drawer where my stuff lives.

And I've started to kind of started to curate around a few things like my dogs and my family vacations to where I am kind of creating folders.

But I do take an awful lot of pictures that that don't get addressed with quickly.

Okay.

Well, that's a good starting point, though, for this.

How should we be organizing our photos?

Let's say, is it by year, is it by event?

Is it by person?

Is there some form of tagging that should be happening so we can easily search like as individuals, not as an institution, but as individuals and families?

How do we start making sense of those 10,000 photos on your phone?

You know, all of those are really good ideas.

I think an easy way that somebody might because we're so tuned in to think temporally about our lives of like, that was before so-and-so passed, or that was after graduation at arranging by year might be a really good kind of marker for for somebody to, to organize, thank goodness I think, or at least an iPhone does a little bit of that, embeds a little bit of that information and work for you.

But then you could go on from there by vacation or, you know, some sort of individual.

This is photos of grandma or photos of so-and-so.

I think it doesn't really matter which way you choose any any where you want to make your collection archive, your own files.

It doesn't really matter so long as you add that context somehow so that somebody who comes to it that doesn't know about it can look at them and have something to go off of.

Right.

But but that's the thing.

Yeah.

My organizing this for me or am I organizing this for the eyes of family members who are going to look at it later?

No, I'd say for yourself, I mean, really, because really, if you're the owner of this collection and you have it, then you need to put you would want to put the information you're aware of, you know, into it.

And that doesn't even have to be, like you said, tagging.

That's a good way to put some like basic metadata, some some information embedded in the file to help somebody search for find it.

But just documenting, you're in some sort of letter or some some something, some documentation to show what this means to you.

What's the context behind these this collection of photographs?

What how is it organized?

Any information you can give it really just putting your own knowledge and experience into it so that hopefully your son or your grandchildren or somebody comes, comes to it later and is able to discover basically that that information that would have been lost otherwise.

Can I use a real life example?

Yeah, I brought this.

So this is this is a visual example.

So for those who are just listening on a podcast platform, I apologize.

So here's a photo.

Okay, hold it up.

I maybe Matt can get a shot of that.

This is from my family.

Okay?

This is my father's mother who's standing up in the back and then her parents.

This was taken in Eastern Europe, I'm guessing the early 1920s.

I could not bear to throw this thing away.

And and I, I don't know that my son has particular interest in hanging on to this 100 and something year old photo, assuming that I have a whole box of these things that I've inherited, like what are the baby steps?

How do I get started?

Whether it's for me or it's an elderly relative, you know, how do we start from this and get ourselves into appropriate archiving for ourselves and our family?

I think a really good starting point for for this particular piece would be to make sure everybody in the photo that you can identify is identified and really tried to get a year on there.

I think that's kind of the the very base of of what you would want on there.

As far as for people to be able to understand what is it I'm looking at and what is the relationship as it's passed down through history?

What is the relationship between people Look at objects and things they want to know how does this relate to me?

And so be being able to have that information that where they could kind of mentally trace or go in genealogy and trace, who are these people to me, I think is a is a really good first step.

And then I think probably and Shawn can correct me or add to it, you know, is is also to digitize it because it is a physical object.

It's just touching it.

It feels to be in pretty good pretty good shape.

But if you're if many folks might be touching it over the years, having a digital copy, a digital surrogate will kind of help prevent all those many hands handling it over over time.

So when you talk about it, maybe this is for you, Sean When when Krista says digitize it, is that as simple as let me take a picture of my picture is that through the iPhone scanning the the photo.

So what does that mean to digitize?

That's a good question.

So essentially, when we digitize, especially for preservation purposes, want to give us a long term, want to have a fairly high resolution.

So sometimes a photograph just off of your phone might be a lower resolution, doesn't capture as much information.

Right.

So an example like this, we want to digitize it at a higher resolution, higher DPI or PPI or just so that there's more information you can zoom in and look at it more closely to save more information with the higher resolution.

So get to a scanner, sometimes a flatbed scanner, sometimes a high end camera will get a good capture of something like that.

And I'll offer up just a little bit back about the physical item, because as in preservation, we care about both the physical and digital.

Yeah.

So I would want to make sure that this this item that you showed to us is environmentally and good can in good locations.

What's not stuck in your attic or your garage where it's hot and humid that will degradation degrade that that material that that photo it's not out in the sun or not having light.

It can also bleach the photograph.

So you want to take good care of the physical item?

Yeah.

The information that Krista said about who are these people?

Have that documentation.

And then the digitization can essentially that digital copy, which you can store in any store anywhere in the cloud or wherever you want with a little bit of information about what that is, is makes it more accessible so some doesn't have to come to your house to see that information.

Right.

And pull it out and look at it.

Yeah.

But can see it on the digital video side of things.

Just what idea that that digital will have to be also maintained.

It's not just like I talked about maintain the physical item you also have to maintain the digital so make sure that it's looked at there's no degradation of the the digital file that's kept multiple copies is a good way to do that too.

So something happened.

When we say storage for digital, I think people think of the computer hard, hard drive and that's not a very safe digital storage, but it'll crash.

And then not too long, right?

Only maybe the last three or four or five years, maybe even a little longer.

Cloud storage is good.

There are other options external hard drives, but having all your eggs in one basket sometimes is the easy way to lose.

Yeah, but the digital content, it's all stored in one place.

Yeah.

So looking at your own lives, Krista you've already confessed.

You've got 10,000 photos on your on your phone.

But what are what are some ways that the two of you have have found work again in your own wise for collecting and organizing your photos so maybe we can learn from?

So I think something that I definitely do, which is and this is letting you all into a secret in the archives, we don't keep everything either.

What I know, it's, it's, it's, it's shocking.

But we do a lot of what we call appraisals, so we determine what is important.

And one of the ways that I determine what is important in in kind of thinking about my own stuff in my own life that I want to it's understanding the context of you know, a physical object, understanding the story behind it.

You know, I may have, you know, like you seeing this photograph, this photograph just represents right now just a photograph if somebody handed it to me.

But what I try to understand is what is the story?

Who are the people behind the photograph?

Because then that that creates that human connection.

And so I try to do that with all of my try to try to re constitute or understand or create a narrative of what what is the context, what is the meaning, what is the importance behind this particular object that I am making an intentional effort to put in a folder that with labeled and with information.

So that's something that that I do is I really try to kind of have a hard conversation with myself of what is important for me and then trying to then start to organize that in folders for myself.

Sean They don't it doesn't have to be a perfect organization.

It's just basically just adding some context to it so that people can can know what is this about an example like maybe a picture of a tree and you're like, What's a tree?

Like, nobody cares about this.

We might throw it away unless we know there's a context like, this was the tree that my grandparents planted when they got married.

All of a sudden it's got some story behind it, right?

Yeah.

So it's important now because this tree, which no one would care about otherwise, has some context.

So, for example, of your son right now doing all that work now for yourself to describe and have your collection of albums have that information there.

All of us as we age and get older, we generally kind of want to go back to some of the things from our youth and our interests change.

And there may be a time in which your son is interested and find out, yes, I remember, you know, searching and so having that stuff, the work that you put into it will allow him to and future generations to go to it.

And the all there's a story here.

There's information.

There's something like it is important for my family.

There's some value to it.

So in the last couple of minutes we have any any parting pieces of advice, realizing that you may be talking to Gen X, you may be talking to baby boomers.

Any final words of wisdom?

I would say don't don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

You know, as as Sean was saying, you know, you don't have to have a perfect preservation set up to start saving these materials to putting in just again, just a little bit of effort, identify folks in a photograph, have conversation as with with with other people in your family to depart that context and why, you know, a particular object or particular thing is important that would be kind of my parting thing.

Just just start small, but just start.

Yeah.

Good idea.

Yeah.

Basically, whether digital or physical, it takes some time to actually do that work to the story and the context that one isn't better than the other.

I said that before.

Digital and physical are just different, different forms, different media, different formats, and we have a positive attitude that, you know, the work you put into it.

Now, putting that story, that context to it was a very, very high possibility that it will bear fruit in the future, that somebody will take interest in it and look at, this is what this is about.

I learned something new about my great grandparents.

I did not know before.

So it's not a lost cause.

It's something just put a little effort into it.

And we're looking at a strong possibility that that will will be preserved in time.

And in your your efforts will be more payoff.

Perfect.

Krista Oldham.

Sean Buckner, thanks so much for being with us today.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Of course, Brazos Matters is a production of Aggieland's Public Radio 90.9 KAMU-FM, a member of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement.

Our show was engineered and edited by Matt Dittman.

Thank you so much for listening or for watching.

My name is Jay, Socol.

Have a great day.