Today would have been my dad’s 110th birthday. He lived less than half that long. What he might have accomplished with a few additional years!
I’ve written quite a bit about him over the years. Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written. I mentioned that after he graduated from law school jobs were scarce so, instead of looking for a job, he went to Europe for a year. How he afforded it is a story in itself.
As he traveled he collected his thoughts in a journal. I had known about the last journal of his trip since I was a youngster but it wasn’t until my mom died and I was going through the contents of the family home and cataloguing them that I learned that all of the journals were there. When he filled each journal he mailed it to his mom and, after his mom died (I was just a baby then), he dumped the journals into a box and, ultimately, the box made its way to the rafters of our garage where it sat untouched over a period of 40 years.
Now I have all of the journals here. They’re in horrible condition but I have them. I really need to go through them, read them, and figure out a way of preserving them.
Dave, are you thinking of simple smartphone pictures of each page (saved to a hard drive or web site), or of something more like a dedicated physical archive?
From experience, picture-taking of book pages can be quite fast, provided one has the strength of will not to read through the pages at the same time.
I have better scanners than that. I could use those or I could take pictures. I also have a contraption for taking quality pictures of documents using a smartphone.
I would think a traditional scanner would be more efficient than using a phone camera. Presumably, into PDF format that allows text recognition.