My Summer of Creating Video Tutorials for Personal Digital Archiving

This is a guest post by Ingrid Jernudd, a volunteer with NDIIPP.

For the past week, I’ve been working on creating video tutorials for personal digital archiving and I must say – creating these videos is quite fun!

With the various types of video editing software, I find the process to be relatively intuitive. I’m focusing now on a tutorial for archiving emails, and doing my best to make the information easy to follow, while also working in entertaining aspects where I can.

The reason I have been doing all this, is because I am creating tutorial videos for you! As I mentioned in my previous blog post, part of what I am working on during my time volunteering with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress is creating tutorial videos on how to carry out certain types of digitizing and archiving of information. By the end of the summer I aim to get two videos done as part of a new series on personal digital archiving.

The video I’m currently working on is a basic tutorial on how to archive emails. The second video will be on how to scan documents for personal archiving purposes. These will be available eventually on the NDIIPP personal archiving pages. There is already basic information available there in the form of written instructions on how to do these two things. The email guidance is available via this document.   See this if you want to scan a significant, or meaningful, document or the most recent picture that’s found a home on your refrigerator door drawn by either your kid or you (if you are a kid, that is).  The aim in creating the videos is to further clarify the process, and tutorial videos can be easier to follow then written instructions.

So, for those of you that do prefer to learn via video, I am almost done with the archiving email tutorial. However, it does have to go through some rounds of editing both for the video and audio, and making sure my (lovely, if I do say so) voice-over syncs with the visual component of the tutorial is surprisingly time intensive. The screen recording aspect of the video does mean that, as opposed to following written instructions, you can directly see what you have to physically do on your laptop or other device in order to archive your email. Essentially, it adds a new dimension to step-by-step written instructions.

Both of these videos will be coming out shortly, so stay tuned for their release!