Butler County Historical Society, the Saxonburg Museum and the Zelienople Historical Society all plan to digitalize their collections of photos, manuscripts, letters and other artifacts.

It’s important work, and it will become increasingly more important as the years pass. Photographs degrade over time. Letters and manuscripts written on centuries-old or even decades-old paper can fade and begin to crumble. Old strips of movie film and even old videotapes and oral histories kept on records or cassettes need to be preserved in ways that future generations will be able to learn from them.

Digitizing memories, pieces of the past, is something everyone should consider. Regular people have important photos, papers and other items that tell the tale of their personal history and that of their family. Keeping those memories available for future genealogists in your family is no less important than preserving historical documents.

The Greatest Generation, Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and lived through or fought in World War II, is not that far removed from us. They are or were our grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents. And they wrote letters — lots of them — throughout their wartime experiences, documenting what happened to them and what they missed about home while their families wrote to them about life without them. Most of those letters were written in cursive, already a dying art, and tell stories we can no longer hear.

Preserving history in all its forms, personal and official, means people can access a time that has left indelible imprints on who we are now and who we will be in the years to come.

We like the questions the Butler County Historical Society asks when it comes to what should be digitized sooner rather than later — How fragile or rare is the item and is it at risk of being permanently lost if it’s not scanned? If the answer is yes, the society prioritizes its digitization.

Digitization also makes sharing such items infinitely easier to do and offers a chance for more people to see them than those who can see them only in person.

Volunteers are sometimes needed to help digitize and preserve official items at historical societies and museums. Family historians can get started with a scanning app on their smartphone or a small, personal scanner that connects to a laptop.

Making sure our children and grandchildren can see pieces of our past is important enough work that it’s something we should all be thinking about.

— KL