Guest post: Archivist on managing your kids' stuff

Remember the post two weeks ago about organizing kids' stuff? I got an amazing response from archivist Alison Langmead that I had to share with you. Alison writes:

"First of all, please let me reiterate that I am an archivist and records manager, not a professional organizer or life manager or any such thing. It is my job to help organizations maintain, access and
make use of their stored information for both the short and long terms. That said, more and more information professionals are starting to look in to the serious issue of personal information management as it relates to the information economy and other broader social trends.

I have read through all the comments (pre-January 5th) to the "Help with Organization of Kid Stuff" thread and I have found them fascinating from both a personal and professional point of view. One
general response came to me right away. In my experience, I have found that people have natural tendencies towards keeping their stuff or destroying their stuff. Some people, for example, feel lighter when they clear out an entire closet, while others feel only loss. I call these extreme types "Destroyers" and "Keepers." I think most folks would consider Destroyer a harsh term, but I love it. I'm a natural-born Destroyer. Think Shiva. Perhaps the term "Purger" used so often in this thread is better. On the flipside, "Hoarder" has a major negative connotation for me. So, let's compromise and call these basic types Keepers and Purgers. Quibbles over taxonomy aside, I have found in both my personal and professional experience that there is a kind of personality continuum between these two ends of the spectrum, but
that innate tendencies do exist. Reading the comments to this thread, it has been very easy to differentiate the Keepers from the Purgers and all the gray areas in between.

All of this explanatory build-up has been to say the following: There is nothing so difficult or so emotionally burdensome in the personal domain as being a Keeper who feels social pressure to purge
excessively or being a Purger who feels social pressure to keep excessively.

Many commenters have noted thoughts such as, "I like to purge. Is this bad?" or "I keep everything due to an inappropriate sense of sentimentality." I am of the firm personal conviction that rebelling
against one's natural predilictions does not help us as we go through life. If you like to purge, then you need to accept that, and work with it. The reverse also holds. This is not to say that we can always
just keep and purge at will. We are in this world with other people who have other tendencies and needs. In my professional life, I am constantly in the position of reminding people that the process of
information management is a necessary balance between keeping and purging (or, to be terminologically precise, retention and destruction). If we keep absolutely everything, it becomes almost impossible to find any one given thing, which is almost precisely the same state of affairs that we find if we destroy absolutely everything. Finding the balance, then, between appropriate keeping and purging is what we are all looking for in this thread.

But, compounded with this, I believe that there is general social pressure for women, mothers especially, to be super organized. It is as if we are all supposed to be born with the innate ability to keep it all together. Some of us do indeed have this capacity, others do not. But those who are not so inclined often feel that they are somehow inferior to those who can. This is a crying shame. We should feel free to do whatever makes us feel happy and healthy and what facilitates our ability to raise happy and healthy children. This will be different for everyone.

For some of us, however, it is not social pressure that is the problem, rather physical constraints. If you are a born Keeper who lives with a partner and a child in a 450-square-foot apartment, your living conditions will pose extra challenges for you. Some of the really creative storage ideas found in this thread could really help you out. Balance and acceptance will again always be key.

Enough with that diatribe for now. As promised to you Moxie, I have a few general comments that you and my fellow readers might find helpful.

1) There is a difference between the act of reducing your family's holdings and finding a more compact way to store things. Decide which one of these things you want to do and do it. Do not confuse the two
issues. The first is an act of purging, the second, an act of keeping. They are both good and proper.

2) Scheduling things for purging can be a very good thing ("the one year rule," the toy "death row"...would "toy purgatory" be slightly less morbid? Maybe not.). But as other commenters have already noted, the key to this process is finding the precise right length of time to keep things before you purge them. Otherwise said, the trick to this is not the act of deciding to keep things for a certain period of
time, it's deciding what that "certain period of time" is and what action you will take at that time. By the way, I am less comfortable with the "everything that fits in this small box" rule. I think it leads to preferential treatment on the basis of size and not meaning. Which leads me to...

3) When trying to decide what to keep and what to purge, the pros are always considering their mandates and their user base. Maybe this would be a good thing to do in the personal domain as well. Ask questions like, "Who am I keeping this for?" And, "What will they be doing with it and for how long?" BE HONEST. If you are keeping your children's art for your own sake, then do it up right! If you are
keeping it because you want your kids to have it when they have their own kids, then do that up right as well! In addition, I couldn't agree more with those commenters who suggest that you involve your children
in these decisions when they are capable. Finally, if you are doing it because you are
afraidthatyoumayonedaywishtoseeitagainbutthenagainyoureallyneedthisspace,

then it is my opinion that you should confront that fear and come to some sort of compromise. This might be a moment for the swift one-two of transferring the items to compact storage with a plan to revisit the items later on.

4) Charity is always a good thing.

5) I really do not wish to be a scaremongerer about this, but making digital copies of physical objects is absolutely not a panacea for these issues. I could go on and on about this, and will do so, if requested. Suffice it to say here that, unless you are willing to go to your CD's every two years or so and make sure that all of the data you put on them is still there—meaning, you will need to open up the files and look at them—you might find that you have lost your records of these objects. All types of digital media are prone to corruption and failure. Hard drives even have an accepted "mean time between failure" figure associated with them. CDs, DVDs, hard drives, tapes...all of these objects _will_ fail. It is just a matter of time. Now, let's all take a deep breath. We can get around this problem. It simply takes effort. You have to go back from time to time and check in with your stuff. Just make sure it's still there. Copy it onto new CDs from time to time. By the way, professionally speaking, hard drives are preferred to CDs for longer-term storage, mainly because it's easier to check in on your stuff with a hard drive. You'll do it more often because you aren't sitting there for hours swapping disks in and out. And, one more thing, it is now well-understood in professional circles that, for the long-term, digital objects are *more* expensive to store than physical ones.

I think I've been on my soapbox for long enough. Please feel free to ask any and every follow-up question that comes to your mind. I love talking about this stuff.

And, thanks, Moxie for putting yourself out there and maintaining this fabulous resource. I cannot tell you how many times I have read and re-read a posting at 3am reassuring myself that I am not alone with my perceived faults and my very real fears. With all of our similarities and differences, we are all fantastic mothers."

You're certainly welcome, Alison. Thank you so much for your wonderful post! Questions, anyone?

Comments

[Anon]

Wow, Alison, thank you for the time to succinctly and clearly state this issue. It amazes me sometimes how emotionally-ridden the "stuff-attachment" is. (Witness the boxes of toys not being played with that I can't bring myself to toss/donate and don't get me started on the 3 or more different sizes of stuff in my closet!)

On a more serious note, I wonder if anyone else who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse feels an especially strong pull to be a keeper/hoarder. (My particular abuse centered around a perverse game of hide-and-seek so no need to be Freud to figure out that emotionally I sometimes fall back on "needing places to hide.")

Stinks, stinks, stinks that everytime I'm ready to move into next phase of my life, (motherhood, work outside home mom, mother of toddler, etc.) the childhood stuff rears itself in a new way... hence the clutter.

Would love to hear thoughts from other survivors who have older children and any tips about working through/releasing some of this junk, (emotional and physical).

PS: My husband is a "destroyer" (I was going to say "tosser" but that has a very different connotation in the UK!)

[Kelly]

Thanks so much Alison, for this really detailed, delicious post. I found some really interesting things to think about. I'm definitely a purger, and this has caused problems in my life. Some are fairly trivial, like when my kids fish a 'treasured' object out of the recycling bin with an admonishing 'Who threw this away?' to more serious like when I threw out the bank statements to an account that closed five years ago, only to find that if I had kept them I could potentially receive money back from a credit card settlement...
I do sometimes feel like there's societal pressure on me to keep and treasure all of my kids' stuff, but so far, I'm able to overcome that.
I found very insightful your point about the pressure that women face to be perfectly organized. I think it just falls into the bigger picture of perfect everything: home, body, hair, nails, mother etc. And you're spot on about different things making different people happy.
That's one of the things I love about this site- the anti-dogma. Thanks again Moxie!

[J]

Alison and Moxie, Thank you for probing this topic further. Organization is one of my greatest challenges, not because I am incapable of doing it, but because I find myself switching between being super organized and super disorganized. It must be a psychological thing with me since I know how good it feels to be organized (so I do it), only to then want to "undo" it. It is a real urge that I have at times to want to let things go...to feel unconstrained. And then I feel like one of those bad moms Alison mentioned who is somehow inadequate because her child's clothes aren't sorted out in see-through plastic boxes that are clearly labeled by age or season...I just can't do it. There. I said it. I like the fact that my husband is organized and neat, but apart from the fact that I tend to have more on my plate than he does, there are no excuses for me not being neater. I think of lot of being organized has to do with how you grow up. Does your mom/dad make you put your stuff away? Do they have you make your bed every morning and so on. Mine did not, but we would spend nearly every Saturday cleaning our condo top to bottom (me being a very active participant from age 6). Then the rest of the week would be pretty laissez-faire. Hoarding? That can also be cultural. I grew up in Hungary where I have found that people tend to hold on to objects more so than in the U.S.(even though space is at a premium there much more so than in the U.S.). My best friend in Hungary who lives in the smallest space possible with her 3 children and her husband has kept CLOTHES from middle school, high-school etc. and not because she wants to give them to her kids. They are kept for sentimental reasons and no she does not wear them anymore. Sorry for the disjointed thoughts here. See, I am disorganized! Ha. Anyway, I think what I wanted to reiterate is that I am so glad that Alison brought up the point about how, as a mom, you are supposed to be organized, but that in reality some people just don't have this skill (mother or not), for one reason or another. There are many reasons I find for beating up on myself on a daily basis and being somewhat disorganized tends to be one of them. However, after this post, I think I am going to go easier on myself. Thank you for letting me air out my dirty clothes a bit.

[hush]

For those of us who probably take way too many digital pictures of their kids, what tips can you recommend for keeping the really good snapshots that we want to be able to treasure for the long term "uncorrupted and appreciated"? I wonder if there is some optimal number of photos to take/save, or if there might be some sort of manageable process for culling through the photos from time to time.
Thank you, Alison!

[marsupial jones]

I'd like to hop on with hush who wrote above: What is the safest way to save pictures? I have been considering putting them online to Picasa or Flixter or something, but I am concerned about confidentiality on there because I'm a therapist and do NOT want my clients finding me and my family. I was thinking of printing some of them. I'm nervous about potential crashing hard drives too.
2)I have a lot of things like financial papers, health documents, licensure stuff, school notebooks/documents, old pictures, old mementos (letters etc), and new baby stuff like an umbilical cord etc. I know lots of people linked to nice storage websites etc.last time we talked about this, but I have very little money. How can I store things safely in boxes or bags or closets that I already have? Any money saving tips, maybe using wax paper, saran wrap, foil, tupperware containers or take-out containers I save (maybe this isn't your domain)? I just can't buy big pretty fun box systems etc, though I'd love to. I'm good at organizing and enjoy it but am somewhat overwhelmed right now with the stuff I have in a tiny apartment.

Thanks for fantastic post. I LOVE this site. I am so thankful for the gal who directed me to it.

also: www.flylady.net is a funny and sometimes helpful website about cleaning/organizeing.

[Anon for this]

Anon, I find the exact opposite. I was molested for many years by a member of my nuclear family and I am an unabashed, unsentimental destroyer. For me, it's part practical... but it's probably also very strongly related to not creating/keeping attachments.

That is one really important thing to remember here for me, thanks to Alison's post. Maybe I shouldn't indulge my desire to purge EVERYTHING... because that is all tied up in my emotional/psychological past.

[swizzler]

HUsh: you need to think about ways of storing your stuff that won;t damage it or change it over time. Inert, inert, inert for packaging. I would think that plastic boxes would be OK, but NOT saran wrap (if it is what I think it is) as it decomposes over time. Foil is also a bad idea. Newspaper also bad as it deteriorates and will discolour paper and fabrics next to it.

Also, you need to think about where you are storing things. Again, change is bad: large temperature or humidity changes are going to damage things. So don't put things where it is too damp, or too dry, or too hot, or where the temperature alters massively through the day (e.g. in a conservatory that gets hot in the sun).

[Trope]

What a great post! There's a lot to unpack here, but I think my biggest take-home message is that the keepers have got a valid and workable viewpoint. (I'm a purger, my husband is a massive keeper, and oh! the fights!) So we're working on that little by little. I think I should set an alarm to make me go back and re-read this post monthly or so.

Here's the question: when Alison said, "it is now well-understood in professional circles that, for the long-term, digital objects are *more* expensive to store than physical ones," I was baffled. I've always felt it was faster, cheaper, and safer to save CDs of photos than the printouts, for example. I guess I heard the phrase, "Take a picture, it will last longer," and really took it to heart. How is the digital more expensive to store? (Tell me privately. I don't want my husband to win and finally achieve that storage closet rental that he really really craves.)

[rudyinparis]

[jaw on floor]

Alison, what incredible food for thought. I imagine I may weigh in later but for now I just need to think on these issues. I particularly love the comments here--both yours and posters--about the emotional, personal and social pressures (specifically directed toward mothers) behind our need to purge or keep.

[Lemon]

Wow! What great information!

The information on digital storage eventually failing made the hair on my neck stand on end. I've been awful about printing out photos into scrap books or physical archives. I'm guessing making a nice, quality album would be a good project for the new year... but I have little experience with printing digital photos and what will keep vs. fade over time. Does anyone have any experience with this that could give some tips? Are photobooks that you can order online from places like Kodak or Snapfish high quality? What about where to get prints - Kodak vs. drugstore vs. desktop printer?

[Allison]

Keepers for life!!! :)

[PrehistoricMama]

@Lemon...I consider myself a disorganized person (or "carefree", LOL), but I'm quite militant about uploading my copious digital photos to Snapfish, sharing them electronically with family, ordering prints from the site and putting them into albums with appropriate commentary. This is really the ONLY thing I've been organized about when it comes to my kid. Photos are so important to me, and I do know that with Snapfish at least, if you don't order prints for a certain period of time (6 months maybe?), your account is deactivated. So if you don't have prints of those pictures, or have them saved on your hard drive (we have copies on our Mac, but as people have noted, computers fail. Constantly.), you could lose them.

I'm a huge purger, but I shudder at the thought of not having pictures of this time in our lives. My sister has memory cards full of photos that she does nothing with. I fully understand how that happens, but for me, printing, organizing and sharing our photos is more crucial than a lot of other things.

Just don't go look in my clothes closet...eek.

[caramama]

Alison and Moxie: Thank you so much for this post!

Alison, you've made such great points, ones that I hadn't thought of before or hadn't applied to my personal life. I have worked in electronic document management software systems, but never thought to apply what I've learned at work to my personal life. Like rudyinparis, I'll be congitating on this for a while.

I especially appreciate the point made about figuring out your own time table. When people say, if you haven't worn it in a year you should throw it, I just cringe. My weight fluctuates, and one year a pair of classic-looking pants might be too big on me, but a year or two later, they might be perfect. I'd rather figure out how to store them than buy new clothes all the time. So I need to figure out my own time table.

Here's a tip I thought I'd share: if you or your partner have old t-shirts that you are attached to but don't wear anymore (like my hubby's college fraternity t-shirts), a great idea is to turn them into a quilt! My hubby had his grandma do that for him, and now the quilt has a place of honor in his office. It takes up much less room and is out to be enjoyed.

[deezydubya]

For the posters wanting DIY archival tips, from yet another archivist:

Ziploc bags are made from inert plastic (polyethylene or polypropylene) and are cheap. Don't seal the zips on them as this creates a microclimate and can damage material.

Plastic boxes are better than cardboard, unless the cardboard box is a buffered (archival) box. Again, you don't want an airtight lid or you'll get a microclimate, which can lead to damage.

Constant temperature and humidity is important, so don't put it in a basement, don't put it in an attic, and keep it out of the sun if you want it to stay nice. Records are like potatoes: they like a dry, dark environment for best storage.

If you want something oversize to stay nice, flattening it is best, but space-consuming, so roll it instead. Never use rubber bands, paper clips or other metal fasteners. Rubber bands dry out, snap and can tear records. Metal fasteners can rust and damage records. This applies to paper and to things like textiles.

Real photos (colour ones) are preserved the longest in a cool dark environment (i.e. your deep freeze). Seal them up and put them in a box for best storage. Digital photos printed out: use the printer ink recommended by the printer manufacturer, the paper recommended by the manufacturer, and then treat them like any other photo. Shelf life if kept out of sun is probably something like 25 years, which is about as good as a colour photograph anyway.

The original article talks about digital preservation's challenges - so I won't, because I could go on and on and on same as her! Hard copy is cheaper and more durable. Send hard copies of important photos and even important records (photocopies of your driver's licence, etc) to Grandma's or the office if you want a backup.

[Cloud]

In my house, we have a divide and conquer approach. My hubby is good about keeping our digital archives in order (yes, he actually does go in and check on the CDs/DVDs periodically and transfer to new media... sometimes, it is good to be married to a geek). He is in charge of online/digital stuff and I am in charge of the physical stuff. We are both always behind on things, but at least neither of us feels like it is all up to us. Also we each picked the "chore" that we most enjoy doing, so it feels less like a chore.

For online: we run our own photo management site for sharing and keep the URL private, so I can't offer any advice about picking a site. (See the comment above about marrying a geek.) A lot of people I know like Picassa and Flickr. I think you can limit who can see your photos on some of these sites, if you are concerned about privacy.

For physical prints: I have done drugstore and various online sites. I think the quality is similar, or at least I can't tell the difference. The online sites will let you make "scrapbooks", which is an easy way to print and organize a lot of photos. I haven't tried these, but I hear good things. A friend of mine does an ongoing scrapbook for each of her kids, with one page per year. That is what I am planning to do, with extra pages for the first year.

We cull the photos in rounds: not all make it to the computer from the camera. Not all of those make it to the online site, and far fewer ever get printed.

Pumpkin is too little for artwork... I am thinking about what we'll do with that. Right now, I like the portfolio idea someone mentioned on the original organization post.

[midlife mommy]

Wow! Great post. Thank you! Any thoughts on what to do with the old home movies and thousands and thousands of slides that my parents have at their house? I am very nervous about converting things, because as you said, I've read some scary things about digital media being not worth the powder to blow them Hades, archive-wise.

[Cloud]

@midlife mommy- I am NOT an archivist, but we have thought a lot about these things because we consider our photos/movies to be our most important mementos. Also, we live in SoCal, not too far from a canyon, so we have a non-negligble risk of actually having to evacuate with some small amount of time to grab our most important stuff.

What we came up with is this: no matter how you store your memories, there is a risk of degradation. Anything on media also has a risk that the media will become obsolete (e.g., I have dissertation stuff on an old iOmega zip disk. I might as well just toss it, because I can't read that disk anymore). So we picked a method that makes it easiest to "refresh" the media periodically and keep an offsite backup or two (our offices are also near canyons...) We have converted a lot of things to digital, but then set up a "refresh" schedule (OK, geeky hubby did this).

Also, redundancy is your friend for the most important things. When we convert to digital, we don't always throw out the originals. We keep the most precious ones. So we scan old photos but keep the originals, and also make additional prints for the most precious ones.

I guess my point is: keeping your memories safe takes work no matter how you do it. I think you have to decide what is really, really important and commit to a system to preserve that, and then not worry too much about the other stuff. We decided that if our house burned down, we could live with not having every single photo we ever took, but that we'd get a lot of comfort from having some representative sample. So we have a system that is set up to try to ensure that sample will be perserved.

[hedra]

I agree with the WOW comments. Brilliant, and thank you.

As for the abuse history tie-in, mine has more of a tangential impact. I'm pretty well healed, but I'm still hyper-aware of some emotions, which makes it harder to filter levels of importance. Just the act of processing the emotions can get 'gluey' - stuff that isn't related will get stuck to what I'm doing. But I also find I really resist the sticky-feelings thing, which then makes it easier to purge, so I go through weird cycles of stuuuuuck - TOSS! stuuuuck - TOSS! Got a hitch in my getalong on that, I guess.

I tend to think I'm more a hoarder by nature, if everyone falls SOMEWHERE on the spectrum, but the history (including the bad death-row experiences with toys) tends to press on that, as well. It may just make me think too much/hard about the decisions. Years of therapy definitely helped - in fact, I went into therapy in the first place because of the housework issue, NOT because of the abuse issue. I knew they were related, but I had a functional goal, not a personal healing one. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on how one looks), I got the full personal healing part, and still am working on the housework and clutter several years later. Ah, well.

By the way, one of the articles I read on chronic disorganization linked to the study group on that, and I noticed in their definition of the levels of disorganization that level 1 (normal) doesn't specify the number of rooms functionally disabled by clutter, but the next level up says 'more than two rooms unusable' - so you can have a room or two jammed with boxes of stuff and still count as normal. I found that vastly reassuring, LOL!

As with the others, I like the note about time - the duration of deadlines I've read or been told haven't always worked for me, either. Some are too short, some too long. But I never thought to try to create my OWN deadline! D'OH!

And I was going to recommend Ziploc bags, but I didn't know about the not zipping them! I don't know if my mom zips hers (she uses ziplocs to keep stuff out of contact with the cardboard boxes, and tidy/separate/organized)...

For photos, I print print print. I've had computers fail, and I know digital isn't forever. The photos go into photo boxes ASAP (which can be two years, but they DO go in), with date cards separating at least by season (four per year). Photo boxes are currently not in the ideal storage, but our house doesn't HAVE ideal storage for photos - where it is dark it is too damp or too hot. I have archival sleeves that some will go into eventually, mainly the ones that will be for genealogical purposes (that is, family group shots, proof-of-location/experience shots, goes-with-the-story-about-that-time shots, and so forth). That will keep them a LITTLE longer, but still nowhere like forever.

My DH is still planning to move our family video collection to DVD (professionally). But I try to think of those as ephemera, too - after two or three generations at most, I doubt many of them will be of interest (or in condition for viewing), even if they've been carefully transferred repeatedly to new media. I guess I use the 'audience analysis' part of the process a lot. Much harder to filter when the audience is me, though. Easier if it is someone else - will G want this when he's 30?

[anon for now]

I love this website, not only does it reassure me when I am feeling completely crap as a mother, but it also provides the food for thought that I miss from being at home with my gurgling bambina all day.

I am both a purger and keeper. I can't stand to have cupboards full of stuff I don't use. Everything must have a place and a purpose. However, I do keep carefully organised boxes of keepsakes and photo albums. I am also slightly obsessive about keeping files with all my financial bits n bobs in. In fact I keep spreadsheets with everything from pension payments to how much I've paid for gas etc. It's a joke amongst our friends.

I always print the digital photos I want and put them in an album to tell a story - it's my kind of diary. Then, I keep all the photos on my laptop, back them up onto the external harddrive and occasionally copy the lot onto a CD (that I never recheck).

For our cheapo wedding, we got everyone to be our photographer and then we made up a wedding album on iphoto. We have a lovely book of our photos with comments. I'll do the same for DD's first year.

The stuff I carefully keep in boxes end up in the attic. I even keep things from the past that pain me emotionally . It's like I want to remember everything - good and bad, even if that's not necessarily healthy.

As someone who suffered from an eating disorder, one of the most important purges for me, was getting rid of all my 'thin' clothes. Anorexia is totally about control, which is reflected in my record keeping, and when I recovered, it took me a long time to get rid of the 'thin' clothes. I would look fondly at them, they reminded me of a time when I felt in control, even if I was ill. When I threw them, it was a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Will I have the same battle with my pre-pregnancy clothes??? Who knows - possibly.

Even though, I am big on purging in some areas, it does tend to make me feel guilty. I feel like I'm wasting money or that I have been spoiled by our disposable culture. My MIL keeps EVERYTHING, all put away carefully, and will often recycle things to make something new. Although, that kinda bit me on the ass when she found out I expecting. The 30 year old crap I have politely accepted doesn't bear thinking about (I'll my baby a NEW teething ring, thanks - not my DH's OLD one!!).

[sheSaid]

My grandma did geneology and when she got the age where was consolidating her stuff and eventually passed away she decided to remove all her old photos from albums and make albums for each person. So all the photos of my father are together in an album but without notes or other things related to each other, in safe archival sleeves...

I have now inherited all of her geneology and family archive stuff. There are few notes really and I don't know the people. She did a pretty good job honesty but thought only of stuff in terms of geneology NOT in terms of memories. So there is so much more I want to know about and is lost to me.

What have I learned from that? Nothing I have all of her photos and all of my photos and nothing is organized, or I started got stuck and have not unstuck. Digital stuff I am finally organizing by month and year and do upload the great stuff, but don't print much.

It is a constant conundrum that haunts me. I fear a fire, but yet don't have a solution. So it is good to know I am not alone.... that there is not a clear answer that I am just missing.

[Cloud]

@sheSaid, your comment really helped me crystallize my opinion on the digital vs. hard copy thing. It comes down to the "audience analysis" in the original post. If the audience is you, then why worry about a system to preserve it in perpetuity? Set up a system that will preserve it for your lifetime, and let future generations worry about it if they want to keep it longer. If the audience is your future family, then the most important thing is the context/stories. Save less and explain more.

One Christmas, my Mom gave me a scrapbook with my family history back as far as she had pictures/stories. It is one of my most cherished items, and you'd better believe its on the "take if there is a wildfire" list! A box full of photos without context wouldn't mean nearly as much.

[Simone]

What a wonderful post!! Such great information.

I straddle these extremes, as I am extremely sentimental AND type-A, and therefore have a need to keep a lot but have it organized "just so." This means lots of systems, and frequent culling and revisiting. For mundane stuff like paperwork, it gets filed/paid/shredded immediately, then I do a "file purge" around the same time as preparing for taxes. For the other stuff, I tend to keep in boxes, then cull when those boxes get full, add more boxes, etc. In other words, I cull only when needed to manage the addition of more boxes! At least I know where to find everything, though.

[Julie]

We make the books from iphoto. They are excellent quality - like a nice hard cover picture book you might buy at a bookstore. Nicely bound and printed....lots of options for layout and text. They are about $25 per book - pricey, but if you just make one per yer per kid......I think each book is about 25 pages....then you pay more per page if you want more pages. Front and back counts as one page.

Maybe just for your best, most favorite moments? I don't know. After many years and many kids.....in case of fire it might still be difficult to do. I think the best way to preserve memories for yourself and your children is orally. Talk about your special memories frequently. Look at pictures if you have them, but remembering fun/important times together out loud will preserve pictures and times for your kids as well as hard copies or CDs of photos.

[caramama]

midlife mommy: About old movies... My brother and father recently went through the old movies and put them on DVD. These were home movies from my youth (recorded on VCR tapes) and my dad's youth (recorded on old reel film). They have kept the old form of the movies and now we have something we can (and do) actually watch!

Like cloud said, the redunancy is important. So just because you put things on new media does not mean you have to destroy the old. Or if you are looking for space and do want to destroy, know that there will be ways to convert DVDs to the next technology when that time comes.

It's been amazing to see videos of when I was a baby or even when my dad was--videos that I never would have seen if they hadn't been upgraded to DVDs. And what's the point of keeping things you will never look at or enjoy?

FYI, you don't have to do them yourself. My husband's family sent their old videos out and had someone put them on DVDs for them. Well worth the money to see my hubby as a baby, too!!

[AJs Mom]

When our babies were really young my mommy friends used to talk about where to get the biggest box of bulk diapers; I always bought the smaller packs because going out to get diapers every week was at least an outing. My little girl got used to going out at least once a day and now that she's 15 months old, when she's feeling cooped up, she gets me her coat and says "go".

[AJs Mom]

Sorry, last post should have been on previous topic. Where's my brain?

[Susannah]

hedra, you totally made me laugh about unrelated gluey stuff getting stuck to what you are doing. Yes exactly!

Alison, thank you so much for an astonishing post! You have parsed a topic I always assumed to be inherently sticky and gluey into something completely manageable. AND, you have explained why I get this nagging guilty disconcerted feeling whenever I process my stuff in ways that are out of sync with my nature.

To all: instead of death row or purgatory, how about "launching pad"?

[Anne]

Didn't read all the responses but wanted to get this off before the kiddo wakes up.

THANK YOU Alison for writing your reply. I am also a professional archivist and had written a long response on the whole digital image retention issue, a topic near and dear to me, and then the toddler woke up from his nap and got my attention by hitting the keyboard - poof - gone reply! Along with the digital photos issue I was going to suggest that readers could come up with their own collection policy - as you pointed out "Who am I keeping this for?" And, "What will they be doing with it and for how long?", deciding on what’s important “reducing your family's holdings and finding a more compact way to store things”, and “Scheduling things for purging” (oh how I love to weed things!)

Hush –I wouldn’t say there is ever an optimal number, it’s a very individual decision to make, but I would say if you took 36 photos on you last Disney trip that there are about a dozen or so that really sum up the trip for you, so those would be the photos I’d keep for long term and the rest I’d put on a CD and if they last great if not it's not a big loss (KWIM?). But I would say that there is an optimal number of copies to keep. More than 2 copies of any one thing can get excessive, unless you can keep additional copies in a different location (off site storage).

I’m a recent convert to digital but this is what I’m currently doing with my photos. I’m on flickr and I have the ability to download my photos back to myself if I ever need to – acts as a back-up/off-site storage. I actually only upload a portion of the photos I take, the better ones or the ones that have the most significance to me or the family, in essence weeding the large collection that I have that is kept on CD. At the end of the year I take advantage of the service flickr offers to order prints and have them sent to my home and select X number of the uploaded photos and I order 2-4 copies of each, all photos are then labeled with identifying information (who, what, where, when). 1 copy of a photo goes into storage, an archival quality flat box, 1 copy goes to my Mom and a similar archival box (off-site storage), copies 3 and 4 are either given as gifts or put on display (framed). Ultimately the photos I keep only represent a fraction of the photos I take but they are the ones that mean the most to me.
On what I keep my photos in - I do spend the extra money and order archival quality boxes from a source such as Metal Edge. However I don’t do special photo organizing boxes, just drop front flat boxes and acid free file folders that I cut to fit the box. I like to keep my photos flat b/c if the box you have them in isn’t full, or the photos aren’t properly supported they can curl if they are upright. The box offers protection in the form of keeping dust away and provides a “micro climate” to help with temperature and humidity changes. The box size also acts as a way to limit what I keep, but I would never dream of weeding photos fromthis collection jsut being selective about what goes in. And finally all boxes are kept together in a closet along with other important documents so that if I ever need to “grab and go” in an emergency they are all right there.

[michelle]

i like to purge stuff but hold on to photo's, notes, and clothes. need to work on purging clothes.
recently talked to hubby about it there is a fire, what would you grab (if time) after kid and and animals. we was like what. and i'm like the photo's albums/box. so he suggested a fireproof safe that to hold my albums.
i keep the photo's on the hd, cd, and scrapbook the favortites. everytime i change computers, i make new cd's ot transfer all my files on. so far only lost one cd before download to toddler playing with it. now i keep them up high.
as far as pictures, i believe the ones printed at a store (rather than at home) last longer.

[Shandra]

This was a great post, thank you. I especially like the insight that we can be less than ideally organized and still excellent parents... that's a keeper.

The point about the bin size is also good but until I come to some huge memento, I'm still sticking to it for kid art. ;)

Stuff for me is very fraught. I grew up with two hoarders (whose home is now almost unnavigable on two of three floors, not to mention a full (and I do mean full) two-car garage) but my mother always blamed my sister and I for the mess, and would throw our things out randomly in a very punitive way. You would think this would make me a hoarder but instead for me it makes regular, calm "culling" important because I never, ever want to get to the point that I am *freaking out* throwing things out.

(err, again. But that was pre-child. Flylady helped me with this.)

I think I'm a moderate purger at this point.

My husband is a hoarder though and we do have issues. Preparing our last home for sale he green-lighted me getting rid of certain magazines (he was living in another city) and when I took them to the recycling depot there were 1.2 tonnes of them. So I am not kidding about the hoarding, because that was only ONE of his saving categories. We have just divided the house up and "his rooms" can be, whatever. Full.

It is one of the most rubbingest areas of our marriage though, our different relationships to stuff. And it makes it interesting when it comes to parenting.

[Alison]

Dear Group,

As Moxie has mentioned on today's post, I'm going to write a little more about digital issues to clarify and expand upon my thoughts here.

I am so thrilled to see other archivists speaking up here, and hope that they will contribute more comments on the topic of digital recordkeeping when this new post goes up. Prhaps this will also give Anne the opportunity to re-write her original thoughts on the issue. I'd love to hear them!

[Practical Archivist]

Hiya! Another archivist checking in to say this is truly fantastic. Thanks Alison & Moxie!

I've been saying for years to anyone who will listen that it's OK to purge your photos. Lose the dreck and treat the "keepers" right -- meaning invest the money in archival quality enclosures and invest the time in writing the stories behind your photos.

On the paper vs. plastic issue, you can find good storage materials made out of either one. But I lean towards paper for these reasons: (a) paper breathes and therefore prevents buildup of damaging chemicals, (b) you can use a pencil to mark paper envelopes and folders, and (c) plastic is an "x" factor and can cause damage rather than protect you photos. You can check to see if paper is acid free with a simple pH pen, but testing plastic requires an expensive laboratory.

Also, thanks for spreading the word that digital is not forever. It's not that digitals can't be preserved long term, they can. It's just that it takes a lot more effort than simply tossing prints in a shoebox and ignoring them for a decade or two. I could go on and on about this issue, too...

In fact, I have a whole blog about organizing photos and preserving them, with plenty of archiving tips for family archivists.

http://www.practicalarchivist.com

P.S. A fireproof safe will NOT prevent your film, prints and CDs from melting. Sorry!

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