I can’t believe the school year is coming to an end already! This means a lot of work to get summer schedules in place for my 3 young boys, but it also means I need to get moving on the document archiving mission I promised myself I would complete for my children’s schoolwork.

Needless to say, my busy boys – a preschooler, a kindergartener and a second grader – have created so many wonderful documents (yes, I’m a proud Mom!) throughout the years that I want save.  Since they were infants, I have compiled mementos, cards, schoolwork, artwork, you name it, in boxes labeled for each of them.  As they grow older, and the piles of paper only get bigger, I am realizing that I cannot keep 18 boxes (18 years = 18 boxes) for each child for each year of their young lives (that would be 54 boxes in the case of my brood).

I treasure their artwork and try to hang their most recent “masterpieces” on our family pin-up board that hangs in our kitchen.  As I rotate the artwork throughout the year on the board, inevitably one of my three boys finds their “masterpiece” in the recycle bin.  And you know what comes next — “Mama, you can’t throw away my elephant painting. It’s my favorite!” I relent, of course, and keep their “favorite” artwork because, well, “they are all favorites, Mama!”

So now that June has rolled around, I am forced to confront the two-foot high stack of papers that I have tried to hide away in the family desk drawers. And confront it I did. But before getting into the methods of my digital document archiving madness, I do have to say that It is fun to review the work from the beginning of the school year and see how much the kids have progressed by the end of the year (staying in the lines, handwriting improvements, etc) – again, I told you I was a proud Mom!  Ok, back to the task at hand.  Here is a quick snapshot of how I decided to organize and digitally archive my children’s “masterpieces”:

1.    Sorted the BIG pile of papers by making a separate stack for each child (if you have one kid, this will be a breeze).

2.    Went back to each stack and organized by subject – artwork, spelling, math, journaling, ABC’s, etc. and put the items in calendar order for the school year.

3.    Created folders on our computer for each child – i.e., “Jack 2^nd Grade 2009.”

4.    With my ScanSnap, I scanned to PDF the organized paper stacks of each subject mentioned above and labeled the files accordingly in the folders – i.e., “Jack’s spelling tests 2009.”

5.    Scanned to JPEG (again, using my ScanSnap) each piece of artwork and saved in their designated folders.   I plan to upload these JPEGs and make a music video using Animoto (it’s free) to share with the rest of the family.  I also want to create their own individual art books using Inkubook.   Hopefully, I’ll get to that soon.

6. Photographed the 3-D artwork that is not able to be scanned and uploaded those photos to each child’s folder.

7.    Backed-up all the saved folders on my external hard drive and to my online Dropbox storage account.

8.    And last, but not least, breathed a huge sigh of relief as I felt like such an organized Mom and relished in the thought of how much my boys will appreciate having these “masterpieces” saved electronically 25 years from now!

Megan Fowler
Marketing Communications Manager
Fujitsu Computer Products of America