My friend John discovered a bunch of old scrapbooks in a dusty closet of the church he attends. As he poured over yellowed newspaper clippings, faded photos and church bulletins and directories, he became obsessed with the idea of preserving these. At some point he called me for advice because I had helped him make the transition from an ancient Windows PC to a Google Chromebook.

I suggested he use an app on his iPhone to scan the scrapbooks and save them as PDFs and then organize them in his iCloud account using the Files app. I explained how he could set up a folder structure put these in some sort of order. As the number of folders and files grew it became more and more difficult to do on his phone so I brought up the idea of moving this content to his Google Drive so he could manage it all on his laptop.

Somewhere along the way John asked ChatGPT for help and it mentioned Google Sites as a useful tool for making these files available. Over the years, I think I’ve used most of the better known website tools, going back to FrontPage and up through Blogger, Typepad, Posterous and, finally, WordPress. But I don’t think I was aware of Google Sites. So I started playing around and came up with this, mostly as a demo. The links on the website go to one of the folders or files in John’s Google Drive.

As John shared the site with church members he got lots of excited feedback but he also learned that an amazing (to us) number of people don’t have a computer (laptop or desktop). Everything is in an app on their phone, not the best way to view the old scrapbook content. We needed a way to give the phone-only folks a sense of what John had created.

John has enlisted the help of someone who is more comfortable with today’s technology and the plan is to create a dedicated Google account for the church so the archive files and the website aren’t orphaned when John and I head for the last roundup.

John quickly learned (as I did many years ago) there are basically two types of reaction to a project like this. The most common is a yawn. Who cares about about a bunch of old church scrapbooks. The other is excitement at the discovery of the church’s rich history.