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My Parents Trashed My Baseball Cards. Will My Child Toss My Cherished Photos?

Take a photo. Move on. It’s “in the cloud.” It might be looked back a few times here and there, maybe even shared on social media. But has it been preserved? Has it been archived? Can it be easily found again?

These are questions that Sean Buckner, director of preservation, and Krista Oldham, director of the Texas A&M University Archives, met head-on when joining KAMU’s Jay Socol for a “Brazos Matters” interview.

The trio explored a lingering quandary on Socol’s mind. He’d like to pass on a collection of printed photos to his son, but he doesn’t know if his son has the same connection with physical photos or the desire to keep them.

Enter Buckner and Oldham, who deal with daily questions about preserving and archiving in their work at Texas A&M University Libraries.

“We definitely hear it pretty often,” Oldham said. “There is a lot of guilt when someone has inherited that family history or that family legacy because there is so much emotion and pride attached to physical objects and maybe even digital objects as well. And so I think it’s a pretty common sentiment that we hear from folks that call us and say, ‘Oh, 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.’”

Buckner said they deal with those questions frequently at a university level, but that they are just as tough on the family level. He said it doesn’t matter how you organize items you want to keep as long as you provide context, so that when someone unfamiliar with the items looks at them, they have some background. 

“An example is a picture of a tree,” Buckner said. “And you’re like, ‘What’s this tree? Nobody cares about this.’ We might throw it away unless we know there is a context. Something like, ‘Oh, this is the tree that my grandparents planted when they got married.’ All of a sudden it’s got some story behind it. It has some importance now, because this tree that no one would care about otherwise, has some context.”

Develop a System

Oldham recommends organizing cherished items by year since people “tend to think linearly.” However, she admits to having difficulty organizing her personal digital content. 

“Think about how many photos you have on your phone,” Oldham said. “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.”

She said that’s “human nature.” Those photos lose context, which she said is an “easy gateway” to not knowing what you have with photos, or their associated meaning, because they’re so easy to take. She said it’s not the same as when people regularly took time to go to the store to print the photos they want. 

“A secret in the archives is that we don't keep everything either,” Oldham said. “I know it’s shocking, but we do a lot of what we call appraisals where we determine what is important. One of the ways that I determine what is important in my own life is understanding the context of a physical object and the story behind it.”

Concerns over naming conventions, organization systems, and questions about whether something should be kept, or how it should be kept, extend far beyond photos. Socol turned the podcast conversation to his VHS wedding video, which he thought would last forever, but wedding videos can degrade after 10-25 years. Socol said keeping up with the latest formats and technologies contributes to his anxiety. 

“That’s what we call obsolescence," Buckner said. “That’s when the media items are either too old to begin degrading themselves, or we don’t have the accessible technology to view them anymore … reformatting and migrating is what we do a lot in preservation to make the media accessible in a new format.” 

Keep What You Can 

Buckner said you don’t necessarily want to get rid of the older items because there may be a need to go back to them in the future. He noted that digital items can be more fragile and easier to lose than physical content. 

Digital content can become inaccessible because operating systems and formats change, or media such as compact discs can degrade. Buckner said users sometimes also stop paying cloud storage bills or accidentally delete things. He said it's also easy to improperly name digital media items, making it easier for them to be lost. 

The many aspects of preservation and archiving might seem overwhelming, but Buckner said it starts with small steps and the work that is put in today.

“As we age and get older, we generally want to go back to some of the things from our youth,” Buckner said. “Our interests change and there may be a time when your son is interested in (those photos and items) … the work you put into it will allow him and future generations to go to it and say, ‘oh, there’s a story here, there’s something that’s important to my family,’ there’s some value to it.”