Libraries and Personal Archiving

For a number of years the Library of Congress and libraries around the world have been working to raise awareness about digital archiving by institutions, communities, families and individuals. Many personal digital materials and collections are at risk for lots of reasons including natural disasters, lost passwords, equipment failure, lack of backups, etc. 

The Library of Congress offers specific suggestions for keeping all sorts of personal digital materials and we think that Timebox provides a very useful tool for collecting and keeping photos and stories. Timebox is a simple-to-use, free app for personal digital archiving that can help librarians and their patrons start building their archives today. 

Getting started can be the hardest part but all you have to do is add a photo or a story to Timebox and another and another…the more memories you add the more valuable your Timebox becomes.

And then there are the single-entry and ebook artifacts that you can create with the tap of a button to keep for yourself or share.

Because we are very interested in talking to librarians about personal digital archiving we will be exhibiting at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, Jan. 25-29, booth #338.

We are also very excited to have been accepted to present a poster/demo at the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference that will be held at the University of Maryland Feb. 21-22.

We love libraries (maybe because our CEO has a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science) and look forward to learning more about how we can help librarians lead their community’s archiving efforts.

1.1 Update Available

You spoke and we listened. We have taken your valuable feedback and the lessons learned, since our launch in October, to create Timebox version 1.1.

The most common suggestions have been turned into new features including customization, pinch-zoom, keeping original size and resolution for photos (except for the iPad 1) and a reduced list of default categories.

You can now make Timebox your own by customizing the list of categories and entries.

With pinch-zoom you can zoom most photos (not all photos are zoomable).

Photos are no longer down-sampled so you will always have the original.

You are now presented with a smaller list of categories making it easier to get started.

We also added bug fixes and performance enhancements to improve your all-around Timebox experience.

We hope you have fun creating Timebox entries and ebooks and sharing them with friends and family. 

Please let us know what you think. All comments and feedback welcome.

Thanks for your help making a better Timebox. 

Photo Collecting Made Simple

We chose photos as the first thing you could collect in your Timebox because everyone has them.

Speaking for myself, my photos are a mess and finding the one I am looking for can be a pain. 

There are a couple of ways Timebox makes collecting photos easier:

• After tapping the Add Photos button, I can select a source - iPhone, Facebook, Mary Ellen’s Photos on my Mac or Len’s Photos on his Mac (we enabled Sharing in iPhoto preferences so they show up in Timebox - see screenshot below). I love seeing the photos in Len’s iPhoto library and importing the ones I want into my Timebox. Not too long ago, prints would have been the only way I could see those photos.
   
• After I’ve set the date for my Timebox entry, the list of photos in the source library will automatically scroll to the photos for that date - no manual scrolling required.

We will be adding more sources for all sorts of digital things in future updates — stay tuned.