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Historypin: A Digital Legacy for the World

You can’t spend much time thinking about your digital afterlife without considering personal archiving and how you’ll preserve your family mementos for future generations. In fact lot’s of people are working to help individuals do just that, including the Library of Congress and online services like 1000 Memories and Chronicle of Life. Today I stumbled upon a new website from the UK called Historypin. They’re in partnership with Google to create a visual history of the world. They’re asking website visitors to “pin” their history to the world by scanning those boxes of old photographs and placing them on the map. Essentially they’re adding latitude and longitude metadata to each image.

I’m extremely excited about this effort. While personal archives are important for your own legacy, I think there’s a much greater potential to be remembered in a sense by contributing your content to a project like this. It increases the likelihood that it will be cared for well into future generations and that more people will see and appreciate it.

Here’s a short video for you that explains more about Historypin.

I encourage you to visit the site and start scanning those photos. And while you’re at it, you should consider these scanning guidelines from the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress resources if you want an archival-quality result.

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