I finished sorting and scanning the initial set of mementos at the end of November last year. Of the 734 items considered, 434 were included in the collection, indexed and digitised; and, of those, 133 were retained in their original physical form and stored temporarily in presentation folders or a display cabinet. With that complete I was able to include the Memento Collection in work on understanding the role of the artefact in the digital age.

However, It was always my intention to explore ways of bringing both the physical and digital mementos to life and making them visible and accessible, at some point in the future. The opportunity to do so arrived sooner than I anticipated when, by chance, the SideBooks tool that I identified for my electronic bookshelf work turned out to be an excellent mechanism for doing just that. It displays the first page of a PDF file on a virtual bookshelf in an iPad tablet – and, since many Mementos are more pictorial than just plain text, this results in a very visible and accessible display. Furthermore, SideBooks has an inbuilt capability to import files using Dropbox. Consequently I was able to import and assemble the 400+ memento files into SideBooks on my iPad over the course of just a few days. I’m very pleased with the result. My mementos which had been locked up in a jumble in a box in the loft for years, are now visible and accessible in an instantly accessible iPad which I can carry round the house with me and take with me wherever I go. Some example screens are shown below.

I may do more work on bringing the mementos to life in the future but for now I have a very workable and serviceable solution. Of course, there is still the remainder of the Year Files from after I got married in 1980 to the present day that need to be sorted, indexed and scanned before this Journey will be complete. That exercise may throw up some further insights since, unlike the work I have done to date on my own, it will be conducted with my wife who may have other ideas of what to keep and why, and how to store and display items.