Digitise your heritage

In the wake of 2006's summer floods we’ve all become more aware of just how vulnerable personal possessions and data can be.

It’s not only the weather that threatens our stuff of course ­ it’s also vulnerable to theft, accidental damage, loss and all manner of risks, as a quick read through your household contents policy will reveal.

By digitally archiving the important things you own, you can at least ensure that you’ll have a record of them in the event of the worst happening. You can archive just about anything; obvious candidates include your photo, video and music collections.

Anything on paper can be scanned and stored electronically, so you can say goodbye to ugly filing cabinets full of insurance policies, property deeds, educational and professional qualifications and even bills and receipts. Even valuables like jewellery, artworks, and coin and stamp collections can be scanned, or photographed with a digital camera.

Digitally archiving your documents and possessions has other advantages besides security. Old documents, films, audio recordings and photos from previous generations can be captured in their present state, before further age-related damage renders them unreadable. If they are already in a bad way you can restore the digital copy and produce a pristine permanent record.

In this feature we’ll look at how to digitally archive everything you and your forebears might have accumulated during the course of several lifetimes, from Super 8 film to share certificates. We’ll cover what hardware and software you need, show you how to use it to digitise, restore, store and retrieve your documents and possessions and, if you can’t do it yourself, point you in the direction of someone who can.

Photos, prints, slides and negatives
If you already have a flatbed scanner you may be able to press it into service archiving your photo collection, but if you have a lot of images to scan, or a mixture of prints, slides and negatives, you might want to think about buying one specially for the job.

The first thing to consider is the media type. If you need to scan transparent media (for example, slides) as well as reflective (prints) media, a scanner that can do both would seem a good idea. Flatbed scanners are designed first and foremost to scan prints, but many models have a built-in backlight in the scanner lid (or provide it as an option) that illuminates slides and negatives from behind, allowing them to be scanned by the CCD scanning head below.

There are drawbacks to scanning slides on a flatbed scanner though. The optical resolution is often too low to provide a scan at sufficient resolution to print much bigger than postcard size ­ though if you only ever intend to view the scans on screen this may not be an issue.

The other problem is that you need to mount the transparencies in a special holder so that they sit directly under the small backlight. Often these holders only accommodate a few slides, or a strip of negatives, and if you have a lot of images to scan it can be very time consuming.

The answer to both of these problems is to buy a dedicated film scanner. Nikon’s range of film scanners includes the Coolscan V ED (around £425) which has an optical resolution of 4,000ppi and can scan strips of negatives and mounted transparencies. The more expensive Coolscan 5000 ED (around £750) accepts an optional roll film adapter which scans up to 40 frames at once and an optional slide feeder which takes up to 50 mounted slides. The Nikon Film scanners also include Digital ICE dust and scratch removal, which will save you hours of retouching, particularly on older slides.

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