leadership dot #2038: conversion

For Christmas this year, I gave my siblings a flash drive – with 3,347 family slides scanned onto it and made a print book with a selection of shots. It was undoubtedly a labor of love, but one that proved to be quite timely given other circumstances. The slides had been sitting in my basement in carousels for several years since we cleaned out the childhood home, but they had remained untouched.

When I started the scanning process, I found many carousels (aka hundreds of slides) that none of the “kids” had ever seen before: my mom and dad’s dating days, wedding and honeymoon; photos of my mom and her sister in high school and slides of times long before any of us were even a thought. While we had spent countless hours watching slides of the family, we always started with our childhood – where we could see ourselves in the pictures – without ever caring about those early days.

If I had not scanned those slides, I am positive that no one would have ever seen them, and now they have become prized treasures.

Think about what old media is lurking in the basement of your home or organization. Are there old documents or photographs that would be better put into a book that could be shared? Can you find untold stories in storage that should be put into a vehicle to be appreciated? Is there a project that would make the visuals of your legacy come to life?

It may not be easy to convert old memories into modern methods, but it is so worth the effort to do so.