I have been reading Stacy Julian's "Photo Freedom" book which encourages scrapbookers to scrapbook in a non-chronological order and provides a theme/category system to allow you do this in a guilt-free way.

I have to say, scrapping chronologically has never really been a problem for me. I usually print the photos I think I'll use, shove them in the albums' page protectors in chronological order and then scrap what I want as I've left enough space (and I can always shuffle the pages later). I guess this would be harder if you used a strap hinge system and didn't calculate the space you'd need.

But what I did like about her book was:

• the idea of putting "like" photos with "like" to draw comparisons;
• the idea of using the remaining photos from an event in a different context;
• the idea of storing layouts relating to the same person (like grandma) together;
• the idea of having themed albums so that you can see how many layouts you do of each type (Us, Things, Places, People We Love) and can balance this as you see fit.

What I noticed from mentally subdiving my existing layouts into these 4 categories, is that I don't really scapbook Places or People We Love, and even my Things was looking decidedly skimpy.

I think this is where I can expand what I am scrapbooking and provide more meaningful insight into our lives. And I think this explains why I have a box of memorabilia, newspaper cuttings and other stuff that hasn't been scrapbooked (and I doubt will ever be, using my current system).

I thought it would be fun to document my journey in creating a Library of Memories especially as I am a mostly digital (but not completely) scrapbooker. I have done extensive searches online to find out about implementing a digital LOM system and have found nothing at all. So I hope to help other digiscrappers who want to do this.

Plan
To implement Stacy's LOM system, I am going to implement her four categories:

• All About Us,
• People We Love,
• Places We've Been,
• Things We Do

with subcategories based on those in the book.

Separate to this I will keep my heritage photos (i.e. any photos from before I was born) in with my genealogy files. Stacy keeps Family History Drawers but obviously she doesn't have the 20 years worth of genealogical research that I do :) I already have a great binder based filing system for my genealogy files which is published here. I am now including my heritage page layouts as I have switched to 12x12 ring binders from American Crafts instead of 8.5x11 binders from Staples (although I could have scrapped them in the smaller size).

As a digital scrapbooker I currently use Photoshop Elements 6 to find my photos and ACDSee Pro 2 to manage my digital scrapbooking supplies. I use Photoshop CS3/Bridge and Lightroom only occasionally as I find PSE6 does almost everything I need. My plan is to use the organizer where it makes sense to do so but am willing to use other programs as necessary and I will discuss some of the alternative programs I have looked at and why they will or won't work for me.