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Saturday, January 31, 2015

Journals

So ever since my first church lesson about the importance of keeping a journal... I have kept a journal. I think that was when I was in the 3rd grade. I wasn't always super consistent... but over the years I still ended up with a lot of journals. Those journals ended up in a box when I moved out of the house along with other boxes I kept at my parents house. I stopped writing in a journal when I started using this blog as my journal almost 7 years ago.

Years ago my parents had us take all of our boxes. It's interesting because you look through those boxes again years later and you think... why was I keeping this or holding on to that? Then you end up throwing a bunch of stuff away and keeping very few things.

Well somehow I had a couple of boxes get left behind and I recently acquired them. They were all of my old journals.

Lately I have been trying to get rid of the clutter in my life and throw away or give away to DI things that I don't use or need and also trying to figure out how to keep things but in a better space efficient way... I threw away all of my DVD cases and have all of my DVD's in a smaller case. I got rid of 90% of my CD's and put all of the music I didn't already have on my computer. So on and so forth.

Now I have all of these journals. Journals are important and I don't necessarily want to just throw them away even though most of my younger years journals consist of who I played with, who I had a crush on and what I ate that day. Do you type them all out? That would be so much work and sometimes it's cute to see your younger self's terrible penmanship and terrifying grammar. Do you toss them out at all? That would save space. Would I miss the actual journal itself one day? Do I scan them? I don't have a scanner and I would imagine paying a company to do it would add up quickly.

My idea is to go through each journal in order and take a picture of each page with my phone (easier than scanning) and then storing the pictures on my external hard drive. That way I have them all still in the original writing just without the original journal. I could still put it in a book one day if I so desired and I'm saving space... tons of it. I know it would be a lot of work, but less than being scanned. Just take one journal at a time.

That is my idea but I am open for suggestions. Anyone else still have their old journals? If so what have you done with them?


5 comments:

Ellis Atwood said...

I feel like I saw some sort of book scanning device in the family history wing of the BYU Library. You should check there, I bet they would let you use it for free, and I bet it would be easier than taking pictures.

Tracy Mills said...

Thanks Ellis! Great suggestion.

Kristy said...

I have had the same thought for years now about my own multitudes of journals. Sometime I want to use them to write my life story, or create a childhood memory scrapbook with my pictures and awards and things. But that day has definitely not come so I still hang on to mine.

Logan said...

For some of my jobs, people have had apps on their phone they used to take pictures of hundreds of pages of documents. It would save them in pdf format, I think. I'm not exactly sure of all the benefits, but I thought it might be something you could look into. Good luck! For what it's worth, I would vote to find space to keep the originals.

jamie hixon said...

I have no ideas, but it looks like you got some good suggestions. I have all of my old journals too.