Becoming Your Own Archivist - Preserving Family Photos & Documents at Home   

The Chapman Center at Kansas State University is devoted to preserving the memories and stories of the Great Plains, but this mission requires teamwork! We believe that family photos and documents can be a lasting treasure over generations, but preserving these memories requires organization and a little bit of know-how. This talk will cover strategies to organize, store, and protect family photos and documents so that future generations will be able to learn from and enjoy these records. We will discuss how to identify and store key information related to archive materials, as well as methods for digitizing these items and protecting them from natural decay. We will also share an overview of the Chapman Center to show how student and community partnerships can help preserve the stories of Kansas that might otherwise be forgotten.   

                Mary Kohn is an Associate Professor in English and Director of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University. Her work examines regional and social variation in language with a focus on the Great Plains. She also examines language change across the lifespan through the Frank Porter Graham Project, resulting in books published by Cambridge University Press and Duke University Press. Most recently, she was awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America.