I’m gearing up to dive into a huge project at home, digitizing a sizeable photo-archive.  This week I’m planning on ordering a scanner build just for photograph scanning, an Epson Perfection 600.  I’m really hoping the “Digital ICE” is as good as reported.  Some of the slides, negatives, and photos I’ll be scanning do have some damage, so I’m very hopeful that this built in corrective software can really do what it’s claiming.

In the mean time, I’m trying to convince my mom to give me full access to all the pictures around her home, they’re scattered throughout her house in boxes, folders, memory books, framed-hanging on the wall, etc.  So it will be quite an undertaking.  I have some books or other written materials that have simple Xerox type copies of photos, so I’d really like to find the originals and get those scanned in as well.  I’d also like to convert some/most/all of that written material into a digital format as well, so it’s a nice feature that this Epson scanner also has OCR capabilities.

My goal for an end result would be to build a webified digital archive for our family history.  There are a couple of other sites out there already, but they’re not very comprehensive, nor do they have the web design background that I will be able to bring to bear on the project.  Eventually, I’d like to partner with the existing sites to make them all easier to navigate and provide a bit more cohesion to the whole family archives.  We’ll see how it goes. I know of two sites out there already:

• Lowe Family Page (Caution – they’ve got embedded music, a major pet peeve of mine!) 
• History of Richard Lowe (My Great, Great Grandfather)

Anyways, that’s what will be keeping my time tied up for quite awhile.  Hopefully it will go smoothly once I get into a groove with the project. I hope all your endeavors are working out well, Enjoy!