john smith wrote:
My project for next year's reunion is to meet with as many of the
survivors as possible during the next year and scan as many of their
photographs as I can.

This is a neat project. Here are some ideas so that the work you are
doing now will last a long time into the future. You might already be
doing some or all of these things.

Do these scans in some uncompressed format, like TIFF or PNG, and at
the highest resolution you can. You might convert to JPG or reduce
the resolution for presentation, but keep the original files around
somewhere. If possible, attach the basic metadata (date of picture,
who's in the picture, location, etc) _directly_ to the image file; I
know PNG lets you include text strings in the file and I'm pretty sure
TIFF can as well. If you keep this stuff in a separate file, eventually
it and the pictures will get split up.

The unit histories are brief by their nature, but provide starting
points for jobbing their memories and getting the vets to elaborate
on the details. It also prompts them to remember other interesting
stories. Take a video cam to record their responses.

You may want to also take an audio tape recorder, or at least record
the video soundtrack to audio tape later. So far, audio tape formats
seem to be lasting longer than video tape formats; 20 years from now,
there's a good chance that the audio tape will still be easily playable
but the video tape will not be.

Matt Roberds