Digital Dreaming: Your Step-By-Step Guide for Keeping Family Mementos in the Information Age.

By R. L . Black

Will youa beneficiary of the information agepass down a tidal wave of fragmented and soulless keepsakes to the next generation?

If youre serious about knowing family and you want to discover how to keep family stories, then Digital Dreaming is the book for you.

Inside this book you will discover how to:

declutter and organize photos and documents,
keep your treasured family keepsakes meaningful now and for the future, and
organize and share fragmented and dispersed mementos with family and lifelong friends.

Will your benefactors hit the delete key and look longingly at the local council clean-up calendar to see when to offload the boxes of photos and documents?

In 2013 these questions confronted R.L. Black. He had become stranded on Family Heritage Island with thousands of keepsakes strewn about like flotsam and jetsam after the death of his late father. Determined to escape his anxiety and guilt on the island, he set about saving the mementos by building a digital lifeboat to rescue his family knowing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Sep 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452529974

R. L . Black

Rodney Black is motivated by knowledge and family events bringing a sense of belonging in people’s life. He has managed knowledge for corporations for thirty years, but with data and storage, not with personal family keepsakes. He started his career as a Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA), and then branched out into information systems and data warehousing. When he inherited plastic bags full of family mementos in March 2013, he felt stranded and alone, as if he'd been shipwrecked on an island. He resisted the urge to bin them. Instead, he set about thinking of ways to keep their family soul, and to respect them for surviving to this point – to treat them as Soul Assets. He is married and lives with his wife, son and toy poodle on the northern beaches of Sydney Australia.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 R . L . Black for Soul Assets.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2996-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2997-4 (e)

Creator: Black, R.L., 1964-, author.

Title: Digital dreaming :your step-by-step guide for keeping family

mementos in the information age. Book one/R . L . Black.

Subjects:   Family archives — Management.

   Family records — Management.

   Archival materials — Digitization.

   Archival materials — Conservation and restoration.

   Digital preservation.

   Knowledge management.

Dewey Number: 929.2028

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/12/2015

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Contents

Introduction

Part One - KEEP YOUR FAMILY KNOWLEDGE

Journey Into Digital Dreaming

Can You Trust Digital Technology?

Why Use A Knowledge Process?

What Is The Family Knowledge Process?

Process 1. Create Your Family Group Code

Process 2. Sort And Classify Your Mementos

Process 3. Journal Your Family Events

Process 4. Scan And File Your Mementos

Process 5. KEEP Knowing – Repeat Processes 1 to 4

When And Where Do You Start?

Part Two - MY PROJECT WORKBOOK

Plan My Project: Get Ready To Dream

Step 1: Create My Family Group Code

Step 2: Sort and Classify My Mementos

Step 3: My Family Group Inventory Estimate

Step 4: Journal My Family Events

Step 5: Scan and File the Mementos

Step 6: Prized Possessions

Step 7: What’s My Digital Dreaming Percentage?

KEEP Knowing

Glossary

List of Illustrations

Dedication

Digital Dreaming is dedicated to those who have recorded, presented, and honoured family events for future family to understand, respect and cherish.

To know family is to love family.

KEEP Knowing.

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Introduction

The title, Digital Dreaming, comes from a Western interpretation of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs. Australian Aboriginal languages have no word for time; the past, present and future are captured in ‘dreaming’. This culture, rich in family stories, uses the nature of ‘dreaming’ to give each person spiritual identity and a sense of belonging. Aboriginal dream stories, passed down through generations, provide Aboriginal people with a deep cultural identity integrated with family and the environment.

Digital Dreaming gives readers a valuable gift – a supportive knowledge system that keeps your ‘family dreaming’. Acquire the process explained in this book and you’ll be able to take ownership and enrich family identity for generations to come.

The digital revolution that we are all a part of is a double-edged sword. On one edge is the revolution providing cheap storage to help preserve, integrate and connect your family stories. The other edge allows us to accumulate excessive details about our lives over a dispersed and widening array of digital devices. Ironically, the revolution is making it easier to lose the importance of family stories and sense of personal belonging.

Without harnessing a family knowledge process, will we – the first generations of the Information Age – pass down a tidal wave of fragmented and soulless mementos to the next generation? Will the receiving family just hit the delete key and look longingly at the local council clean-up calendar to see when to offload the boxes of photos and documents?

Technology doesn’t turn thousands of photos, Tweets, emails, and Facebook entries into family stories. Only real people living in a family can be responsible for processing this knowledge.

Presenting mementos about family events is a life skill in the Information Age. Because it’s now second nature for people to leave behind a large variety of digital files and tangible memorabilia, this ‘how-to’ guidebook will enable you to manage the quality of your event gathering and honour your family identity for future relatives. The past is a present that future relatives will have a longing to know about, one day.

Now is the time: KEEP the knowledge to honour your family.

Part One - KEEP YOUR FAMILY KNOWLEDGE

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KEEP Knowing

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Journey Into

Digital Dreaming

I had slept for five hours. The sound of light breathing had ended and the silence I’d been preparing for had arrived. In that interval of sleep, Dad finished his duel with cancer. Over four weeks, I’d interviewed him as he reflected and shared his family dreaming. To wish for more time is human, but to be grateful for capturing a story connected to me – that feels eternal.

Dad had been open in planning for his death. He proactively re-organised his life to deal with the medical condition that confronted him and I assisted him with the new challenges he faced. He shut down his woodcraft business, sold his house in central New South Wales and moved to Sydney into a tidy RSL village on the northern beaches. During this time we decided that I’d take on two roles: I would be his prime carer and he’d spend time to pass on his family knowledge to me. I was to become the family journalist and record his stories.

My family had lost Mum in a tragic event, a car accident, thirteen years earlier. I had questions I needed to ask Dad about Mum and her story. Mother’s unexpected death had left me wishing I could have recorded her life. Preparing for Mum’s funeral service was confrontational; we were too grief-stricken to gather details of her rich life story and share it with friends at her service. The knowledge that our family knew about Mum wasn’t maintained in a family knowledge process. If our family had followed this process in 1999, we would have been empowered to present a service that was a loving reflection of her life. If only…

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I have managed information projects for multinational corporations for thirty years. I entered the corporate world when the digital revolution landed in the workplace. It was a time when big corporates divided their information technology (IT) budgets between