My mother has approximately 12 years of daily calendar entries in various day planners and other similar fill-in notebooks. How to preserve them is a concern. The entries are short and usually revolve around the weather, farming, who called, who visited, and other short snippets of daily life. They are not diaries with long, detailed entries.

So how to preserve them?

I’ve decided to take pictures of each page instead of scanning them. I realize that scanning can create higher quality images. I also realize that I’m not reproducing photographs here. My goal is to preserve the text and taking photographs will be much faster than scanning. That makes the likelihood that I actually complete the project higher.

And to me actually getting it done matters.

That time can then be used to create a guide to the entries. This guide is not going to be a complete annotation of every day–at least that’s not my goal at this point. My initial goal with a guide is to reference the individuals she only mentions by a first name and indicate who I think they are. The same can be done with farm properties (eg. “the Coeur place”), local businesses (eg. “Casey’s), and the like. To me, the annotation seems important as well as when I and my brother are gone, much of that knowledge will be gone as well.