Organizing memorabilia is an approach to take to avoid your precious keepsakes becoming a disorganized mess. Getting organized can declutter your home, as well as your life in general. Keeping and collecting memorabilia can be rewarding, but keeping track of your inventory can still be a task, nevertheless. The best thing you can do, to actually be able to enjoy your different collections is to get it sorted, documented and displayed appropriately. This can often times mean in storage, and so it is a good idea to have a record of what you are keeping — an inventory with Paper Tiger Filing System Software for document management that allows indexing of items.
What to Include When Organizing Memorabilia
Memorabilia could be anything you keep as either a collector or for sentimental reasons. For some, this could be a collection of sports related items, including baseball cards or jerseys, for example. For others, it could be items that have been picked up from around the globe during travels. And for some, it can be family photos as well as other types of family history documentation. To get the most enjoyment from having a collection of memorabilia though, it is a good idea to get organized with it.
Photos, for example, can get lost, shuffled, destroyed and become otherwise clutter if not set up in an organized manner. The best thing you can do is put them in photo albums, especially if you can sort them by date or subject matter first. At the very least, keeping them sorted and kept protected in smaller boxes will help preserve the photos and help you with your organized living.
When indexing your photos, you would want to input into the filing system software who is in the pictures, where the pictures were taken and any other pertinent information so that you, your children and grandchildren, will know who or what they are 20 years from now. A suggestion for indexing your photos in Paper Tiger: you might name a separate Location for each set of photos, such as Vacation June 2011 or Suzy’s Wedding; or you could have a separate database named Photos. Then have a Location within the Photos database for each set of photos, Vacation June 2011 or Suzy’s Wedding. Then for each picture within that Location (subject), you can write on the back of the photo the number in which Paper Tiger assigns to it when you input the information such as mentioned previously, about each individual picture. So the number on the back of the picture coincides with the Item Number in Paper Tiger.
Of course, if you don’t want to get that detailed, within your regular database, you could have one Location for all Photos, and have an Item Name for each group of photos. In this case, the Item Name would be Vacation June 2011, and you would just input all information (general or specific) into the keyword section relating to all of the pictures in this group.
Get Organized!
While it may be great to keep every letter from your child when he was at camp or the crayon drawings from each of the grandchildren, it can cause disorganization in your life and home. But, before you go on a cleaning rampage and toss out things you might later regret getting rid of, get organized.
Organizing memorabilia means you can keep the movie ticket from the first date you and your spouse went on, but not have it thrown together with other things. Allowing your keepsakes to be mixed with things that aren’t dear to you increases the chance something will get damaged or thrown away accidentally.
So, you create storage for these types of items. Baby books, photo albums, boxes with small loose items, or collectible plates you want preserved not displayed, all of these things get their own safe storage. Once you have these types of items sorted you can use the filing system software to keep track of what you have and where you have it – even if you store it somewhere other than your home.
Getting organized means that these keepsakes can be preserved not just for you, but for generations to come. Not only will you have your items protected but your filing system will help others know what there is and how to locate it. Organizing memorabilia and indexing the items into Paper Tiger Filing System Software for document management means you can love and enjoy your collection without it being a clutter problem and know exactly what you have and where each item is located with a quick search in the filing system database.
Tags: collectibles, Declutter, filing system software, get organized, memorabilia, photos
[...] This article by Bonnie Joy Dewkett gives some great tips to organize your photos. We also recommend Paper Tiger Filing System Software for organizing and indexing your photos so you can find them quickly and easily when you want or need them. See also our blog article Organizing Memorabilia for Organized Living [...]