I would love to learn more about best practices and tools for digitization, specifically focused on archiving sentimental items.
Tips and tools for (relatively) inexpensive, private (not advertising/tracking-funded) and secure sharing of digital achives with extended family members would also be most appreciated! Thanks for the pointer to https://omeka.org/.
Personally I have settled for private YouTube videos with email list access control as "better than hard drive failure" but I'm not totally happy with the choice. I would have preferred Google Photos but there is no free bulk upload option (import via Google Drive keeps original quality).
We get our students to sign up to Reclaim Hosting and via the control panel get them to install and play with private Omeka instances with either archival material of their own or with material we provide.
Am also a fan of Omeka (and the OCLC's Dublin Core), basically anything that comes out of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University (GMU) is world class.
There's also ArchivesSpace which seems very professional (which appears to be an amalgamation of Archon and Archivists' Toolkit but I haven't used any of them.
There are probably lots of others. And I'm sure as well there are expensive tools with dedicated support.
> The complete collection is set to be released this month via a new website.
They're currently running Omeka for this collection, which I'm a fan of.