Dilemma, what to do with old photos and slides.

[arcadian]

My wife just acquired her father's old slide and photo collection. He was a wildlife conservationist and wrote a few books. Not famous or anything. The guy was well traveled and the pictures are from all over the world. He was also in charge of a graves registration during WWII, some of the pics are from that era, some macabre stuff like bodies of POWs from Dachau and other such material. We don't know what to do with it. We feel that if we throw the stuff out a great resource will be lost. Are we just deluding ourselves? Is the stuff pretty much useless?

The wildlife stuff is from all over the world, zebra, flamingos, lions etc. from Africa. I was thinking that modern wildlife biologist might want this stuff, I don't know. The WWII stuff I think could be given to a museum. Any ideas?

[intheflow]

1. Maybe contact your local library and/or historical society?

Or, the local library/historical society where your FIL lived? He may not be famous, but he may be a notable local citizen.

Good luck. I feel for you. My mom has boxes of family history (letters from when Confederate troops occupied a relative's house, daguerreotypes by the dozens, family bible with genealogy going back to 1632, etc.), but we can't figure out what to do with those treasures, either.

[puerco-bellies]

2. The stuff regarding Dachau, contact the Museum of Tolerance.

Here in Los Angeles. I think they would not only accept, but preserve information from that period.

Here is the link:

http://www.museumoftolerance.com

[TheCentepedeShoes]

3. Sounds like you have a lot of

important pictures there.
All our family pictures from the mid to late 50's were on slides. I took some of my favorites to a photo shop and had regular pictures made to put in an album or frame for the bookcase.

[realisticphish]

4. contact the Society of American Archivists

http://www.archivists.org/

they may be able to get you contacts, and evaluate what destinations would be ideal

[Resuscitated Ethics]

5. Don't throw out!

Give all the relevant objects you can to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/donation/
"if you have such materials and are willing to donate them to the Museum, please fill out the following form, e-mail [e-mail], call [phone], or print and mail this form."

Study up on your legacy, honor your father in law. Please care for them-advice here
http://aic.stanford.edu/library/online/brochures/photos.html

Why does it all have to go? No space?

[arcadian]

6. Pretty much. no storage space.

n/t

[csziggy]

7. If possible, get them scanned to digital - keep that for your family

Then donate the actual pics and slides to the relevant places as suggested above.

A CD or DVD of pictures takes very little space, but can preserve the images for a long time - and digital versions will be easier to transfer to new methods of storage than physical copies.

[kentauros]

9. I second the scanning advice :)

You can get them professionally scanned or use your own scanner. I intend to get myself a Microtek scanner sometime this coming year so I can scan my parents' slides and photos, too (mostly photos of Japan after the Korean War.)

[csziggy]

10. I've been working off and on for years to scan our hundreds of slides and negatives

Still have tons to go. And I need to re-scan some of the first I did since they are not very good scans.

Here is a nice little slide/negative scanner - it will do a better job on transparencies than any flat bed:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16838108112

[applegrove]

8. I'd write one of the holocaust museums and see if they want the photos.

Don't know what to do with the animal slides. If they are photos and not slides you could simply scan them onto some disk and save space that way.

[begin_within]

11. Keep them DARK

I have thousands of Kodachrome slides my father and grandfather took going back to the first year Kodachrome was released (1935). These are priceless records of a lost world. Save them or donate them to some place that will take good care of them.