By Wendy Korwin

I walk through the world with boarding passes, restaurant napkins and loser raffle tickets tucked in my pockets and swimming around in tote bags. So it makes sense that I love scrapbooks.

If you love a few big things, you can pass them down in your will, or keep them in a safe deposit box. But scrapbooks help us hold onto other things, the stuff that might otherwise float into the trash or, in the case of the napkins, be dispatched for a sneeze. For me, they are proof that we can love many things, even if they’re little things and we love them each just a little.

For archivists, though, scrapbooks can be trickier. Historically, many scrapbook creators have followed the rule, “If it’s kind of flat, it kind of fits.” (Like a cat.) The problem is that the world comes in odd shapes. Newspaper columns happen in long, skinny rectangles that get amputated or folded so they don't dangle off the page. Other things are emphatically three dimensional, but we still invite them into our albums. Bindings hold together pages weighed down by all sorts of hitchhikers: clipped poems, ticket stubs, ribbons -- and organic stuff like flowers, feathers and hair.

These coinciding realities -- of ephemera saved, but not permanently safe -- mean that the people who care for them look for ways to extend their lives, physically as well as digitally.

Take a closer look at the scrapbooks from the Viola D. Roman Papers below!