This massive photograph album from the avid collector of all things Woodrow Wilson, Wallace McClure, includes postcards and a few cut-outs from magazines. When putting together a collection of images along a single theme, it was common to include some printed items that fit in, so that they would not be lost.

Throughout the 20th century, people often created scrapbooks of their lives or significant events with more than just pictures. While photo albums could be bought throughout the period, few options existed for keeping newspaper clippings, letters or other memorabilia, which so many people collected, in a formal book. In the example above you can just see that this scrapbook of political cartoons and articles has been pasted into a large business ledger.

We have scrapbooks made out of a wide range of things such as wallpaper sample books, art albums, school texts, or dictionaries. This can create numerous preservation difficulties when fragile newsprint, photographs, and dried flowers have been pasted into bulky books of various sorts with acidic pages and broken spines. When letters have been included, they might be folded in the original envelopes that threaten to come loose, or the sheets of the letters might be glued down to the pages.

We do have one rare copy of an item sold to scrapbook makers from the early 20th century, but even here, “The Ideal Scrap Book” creates problems for archivists and researchers. Newspaper articles and important documents have become wrinkled within. The included glue has not stood up to the passage of time so that items risk falling out or being torn.

The newspaper articles in so many scrapbooks often can be found from other sources, but one thing that we want to preserve from this fragile material is the act of collection itself, which makes it necessary to keep the scrapbook as an assemblage in some way. Some libraries use large scanners and print out a new version of each scrapbook, actually discarding the original. We have kept the books and are now beginning the work of taking pictures of the pages because they are often too bulky or wrinkled to scan. This does not always make for a perfect resource for researchers, but it does not reflect the original. In this way, the memories that people sought to preserve can be passed on to everyone online.