Preserving family and community history for now and the future
Glories Past seeks to bring your family’s history out of the attic and give it the spotlight it deserves.
To do this, we preserve your original family photographs, letters, journals, manuscripts, and scrapbooks in archival enclosures to ensure long term stability, because originals will always be the most important versions of these documents. After preserving the originals we create high quality digital copies to share with friends and family and to serve as backups to preserve your unique family history from the worst of disasters.
Isn’t this something I can do myself?
On the surface this is a simple task, scanning and filing, but once you start working on scanning, you realize that it is a monumental job that takes long hours to scan 1000+ photos, correct their coloring, upload them online, and then file and preserve them. Scanning one photo takes about one minute, plus a few minutes to correct the color. While uploading is a task that can be done in the background, it is also computer intensive, tying up the computer from doing other tasks. Preservation and filing is the sole task that needs a professional, and it is another task that takes time.
What about online services?
Online services will digitize your photos and they will also give you options for storage, such as a DVD, flash drive, or HDD. These are all services that are offered through Glories Past. While they digitize and send you the digital copies to you, the onus is still on you if you want to share them, and if they do offer cloud storage, it is at a premium and only temporary. What we offer beyond that is preservation of the original photos, these are the most important versions of your photos and they are the only ones that cannot be truly replaced if they are lost. To us, the digital copies are simply safeguards that protect your memories, and allow you to share those memories without fear of damaging them.
Another factor that you may ask is cost. Digitization companies offer many of their services as paid extras, so while their advertised cost is often around $0.22 per photo, once all the extras are factored in, costs balloon to $1 or even as much as $10. With Glories Past, many of those “extras” are part of the package, while our extras are something digitization companies can never do, such as oral histories and heirloom preservation.
Third is distance. Glories Past is catering only to the Miami Valley, Cincinnati, and Columbus; within a 90 mile driving range. Online services only offer limited and often no ability to track progress, and because of the distance between the locations of most of these and their long distance customers, there is no chance to check progress.
Services
Corporate Services
Community history can be split into two areas: family history and that of larger organizations. Those larger organizations may be churches, community groups, charities, or businesses. We offer to these organizations flexible options to help them discover what they have, eliminate junk and extraneous material, organize what is there, and finally preserve and digitize the collection.
Family Services
Preserving a collection of Family Letters, Photographs, and other Documents has long been a largely “Do It Yourself” endeavor. Professional Archivists and Paper Conservators are primarily employed in museums and archives and their services are rarely available to privately held family collections.
Public and Private Classes
Have you been working on preserving your family’s Letters, Photographs, and Documents on your own and want some guidance? Glories Past offers classes to help you organize and properly care for the materials that you need to protect.
You are the curator of your own histories, and simple techniques can preserve your important items for generations to come.
Get in Touch
Have a question? Want to learn more about our services? Have a potential collaboration?