What are the roots of today’s digital scrapbook? Scrapbooking is a visual storytelling method of preserving a legacy of history in the form of photographs, print media, and memorabilia artistically presented in decorated albums. Digital scrapbooking dates back to ancient Greece, where a special notebook known as a “hypomnemata” was used to record events that people had heard, seen or read about that they wanted to preserve and remember.

In the early United States, some of the best-known scrapbookers included Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. An avid scrapbooker, Mark Twain devoted entire Sundays to the hobby and then sold his books through Montgomery Ward.

In the 15th century, books called common books, often used by students, were used to record prayers, poems, and information such as weights and medical formulas. Over time, common books also contained illustrations, newspaper clippings, and recipes, and they proved to be a valuable way of sharing information.

With the advent of photography, scrapbooking began to feature collaged photos with handwritten captions. A scrapbook layout can include letters, newspaper articles, and other memorabilia. Young women in the Victorian era created scrapbooks, friendship albums, or visitor albums containing signatures, cards, locks of hair, poetry, and photographs of their family and friends to give or keep as keepsakes.

The traditional scrapbook

In the United States, Marielen Christensen of Utah is often credited with reviving interest in scrapbooking. She began designing creative pages and three-ring binders for her family’s photographic keepsakes and displayed them at the World Records Conference. She and her husband published a how-to book, Keeping Memories Alive, and opened a scrapbooking store in 1981 that is still open today.

The traditional art of scrapbooking has often brought women together socially to make scrapbooks and share their work and memories. These hobbyists, known as scrapbookers or scrappers, still meet at each other’s homes, local scrapbook stores, scrapbooking conventions, and retreat centers. The term “crop”, a reference to cropping or cropping printed photos, was coined to describe these events.

In the late 1990s, many American junk dealers opened shops to turn their hobby into a business. Between 2001 and 2004, the scrapbooking industry doubled in size to $2.5 billion, with more than 1,600 companies creating scrapbooking products by 2003. In America, the hobby has surpassed golf in popularity: one out of four households have a golf enthusiast; one in three have a scrapbooking enthusiast!

Scrapping goes digital

Naturally, the scrapbook has been modernized with the computer age. Digital scrapbooking is the process of using a scrapbook layout to create pages using photo or image editing software. Digital scrappers import electronic photos and scrapbook graphics into their image-editing programs and arrange them to create digital scrapbook pages.

Digital scrapping was inspired by the methods, style and culture of traditional scrapbooking. Today’s scrapbooking layouts and computer programs are designed to capture the look and feel of traditional scrapbooking and provide creative control over all elements, even those in pre-made templates.

And the social element remains intact in the world of digital scrapping. Many digital scrappers come together to share their digital resources and knowledge about editing programs. They read blogs, attend scrapbooking conventions, and meet other people in chat rooms and online digital scrapbooking forums. It’s easier than ever to share a digital scrapbook with anyone, anywhere!

Saving time and money are among other benefits digital scrapbookers gain over scrapping with glue and paper. Also, while a traditional scrapbook layout and photos can fade or yellow over time, a computer-generated scrapbook layout is archived in a digital format where it is kept safe from the effects of time, heat, oxidation and other factors. A digital scrapbook layout never loses its detail or color.

Another feature that people love about digital scrapbooking is that they can add little notes or embellishments to each photo in the scrapbook layout to convey the story more vividly. This allows them to add their own creativity to the scrapbook layout.

With digital photography growing rapidly, many scrapbookers edit all of their photos on the computer before putting them in an album. They remove red-eye, cut out distracting backgrounds, and enhance the color of images, sharpening the overall effect of your digital scrapbook and giving it a professional look.

Traditional scrappers are realizing that they don’t have to learn programming to create a digital scrapbook or photo collage. This part of digital scrapbooking has been professionally tended to and is served to the junk dealer in the form of a pre-made template and scrapbook layout, often featuring themes that appeal to the masses.

Scrapbooking has come a long way since ancient Greece, but its purpose and effects remain the same, and digital scrapbooking will only increase the popularity of this ancient art, helping to preserve special memories for centuries to come!