Saturday, September 11, 2010

Sorting Saturday - Hundreds & Hundreds of Slides

As I mentioned in my last Sorting Saturday post A Hoarder's Paradise, the Archival Closet is getting rather full. As the Family Archivist, one of my missions is to have an efficiently organized area where our family history can be accessed and enjoyed. So I took a break from sorting the family papers (both those in the Archival Closet and those more recently acquired). A way to quickly clear up some space without getting rid of anything had been spotted.

We are a family of amateur photographers: grandfather, father and daughter. Now that three generations of pictures are together under one roof, I noticed that dad and grandpa (particularly grandpa) liked to store their slides in those trays that could be fed through a slide projector. One roll of 24 or 36 slides takes up a significant amount of space in one of those trays. We have dozens and dozens of trays.

So I purchased a couple of archivally safe slide storage systems to move some of the slides into, came up with an organizational scheme and began moving slides. In just a short time here's what happened:


The contents of the two metal boxes in the back and the 3 slide trays moved into the two blue boxes in front. Each of those boxes holds around 360 slides so I've got about 700 or so slides in a space that is less than a half of the space they were taking up before. When I have time, I can pull out one of many slide viewing devices that have been absconded from the family home and view and cull the slide collection down to something even more manageable!

Here's what's left to be "containerized" into a more space friendly, archivally safe storage situation:

As you can see there are a lot of trays and the burgundy container, the two tone brown case, and the gray case also contain slide trays. The two blue boxes in the upper right corner are the slides that are already done. So there will be a lot of space freed up just by changing the housing for this portion of the family slide collection. Even more will be free once some culling has taken place. We could really have some family fun by pulling out one of the old slide projectors, looking at pictures and sorting at the same time...

© 2010, copyright Michelle Goodrum

2 comments:

  1. As always, interesting to watch your progress.

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  2. I too have hundreds, perhaps thousands of slides that need to be gone through to chose that are worth copying digitally.

    For now, I have the space to store them. For some time periods, few regular photographs were taken so I need to see what there is in my father's collection.

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