autodotbiography's terms
Book builder – is the program you use to go through your life answering questions that becomes a superb book of your life story. You can use it in any order you wish. You can answer as many, or as few, questions as your wish. You can skip chapters, sections or even individual questions. But of course, the more questions you can answer the fuller the story of your life for your family. There may be questions that you find too painful to answer or that you can’t remember – it won’t matter. In the end autodotbiography joins up the dots in your life and produces a beautiful book to be treasured by your family for generations to come.
Memory Joggers – are just that, pieces of music, film, fashion, things that may spark a distant memory and help bring back some long lost moments from your past. While you are thinking about how to answer a question, then a Memory Jogger is there to entertain you as well as do some memory jogging.
Life line - at the top of every page of the questionnaire there is a way to navigate around your life and find the section you want to answer. The line has the chapter headings and the percentage of questions you have answered. From each chapter heading there is a drop down menu of the sections within that chapter.
Scanning - This process of transferring original documents and photographs into a digital format doesn’t need to be complicated. If you have a scanner and feel fairly confident, and have the time, I suggest you do it yourself.
The main point to remember is you are scanning in order to produce a book. And so unlike scanning for use on a website or sending in an email, you need to save the scan at 300dpi. DPI is ‘dots per inch’ and basically it means you are copying the photograph or document at a better quality than on most other occasions. Saving at this quality isn’t always possible – perhaps the original photograph is tiny and of poor quality – but if the photograph is important in telling your life story – then I suggest that your family would rather have a poor quality picture than no picture at all.
If you don’t have the time or the patience to do the scanning yourself there are a number of companies who make it their business to do it for you.
If you have a Happy Snaps or a Staples (office supplies) in your area, then they should be able to do it for you. That means you can carry your precious original documents to them and go back later to pick them up along with a DVD with the scanned material.
There are some very straightforward tips at this website on scanning documents.