GalveScan 2011

After Hurricane IKE visited Galveston Island in September 2008 the curbs of our fair city were filled with flood damaged debris such as piles of ruined furniture, soaked drywall, and ruined electronic equipment. Many of the items being picked up by the garbage collecting cranes you could go to the store and replace. Unfortunately, there were also piles of photos and personal family heirlooms that could never be replaced. The Preservation Resource Center at GHF also lost a great deal of photos and other historic items to IKE's muddy storm surge (no worries, we have been able to reclaim a good deal of them).

Every Saturday in February 2009 GHF sponsored our first GalveScan events for people to bring in their family photos for us to scan and add to our digital archive. We loved looking through all the photos and hearing about happy family memories of the past 100 years. What many do not realize is the amount of information contained in these pictures. To the owner it may seem like a picture of all their siblings lined up on the front porch for the first day of school, but to future researchers and historians there is a wealth of information to be had. We can see the architectural elements on the front porch, whether the house next door was built yet, and what style of windows were on the house.

Along with supplying GHF with a digital copy of your scanned photos we can also supply donors with a back up copy of the image on our server. If the original image is ever lost GHF will have an extra that can be used for duplication.

Tom Green of the Preservation Outreach Committee is leading this year's initiative to continue gathering more photos of Galveston with GalveScan 2011. Tom has set up a website dedicated to collecting and displaying some of the great images he has collected at https://sites.google.com/site/galvescan2011/

Another new option this year is the option of scanning your own images and emailing them to GHF. For those that wish to scan and email their photos we ask that you scan them in at least 300 dpi resolution and save them as either .jpeg or .tif files. You can send your photos and questions/comments to photos@galvestonhistory.org

We are hoping to arrange another series of collection days in the near future at The Bishop's Palace for individuals to bring their photos in to be scanned.

In related news, check out Islander By Choice's blog on the GalveScan project at http://www.ibcgalveston.com/site/2011/04/galvescan.html . While you're there look around to see what other great things are happening around Galveston this summer (especially the Beach Revue).