Digitizing A Stamp Album: The Shape of Archiving Memories
Digitizing A Stamp Album: The Shape of Archiving Memories
Vidya Giri
The first time I found the stamp album, I was around 11. It was hidden in a cupboard at my grandparents' house in Chennai, jammed between old engineering and mathematics textbooks. It was soft-edged and worn along the spine, each stamp delicately held in place. The album belonged to my mother and her brother. They had grown up between India and Mauritius, two former British colonies. Their stamps, spread across the brittle yellowing pages, told a personal and post-colonial history in miniature: Queen Elizabeth regally portrayed next to an extinct Mauritian Dodo; illustrations of temples and national symbols of India; intricate maps and lore; historical events and centenary celebrations.
In postcolonial countries like India and Mauritius, stamps became a medium for building a national identity. The collection itself spans from the late 1950s to 1990s, relatively soon after Indian independence in 1947 and Mauritius independence, in 1968. The newly independent nations could depict their heroes, their flora, their hopes and heritage through a stylized illustration of a freedom fighter, a tiger, a handicraft method. Through stamps, countries articulated who they were, or wanted to be; a demonstration of sovereignty. Despite these intentions, many stamps are in English rather than native languages and opt to celebrate monarchs and anniversaries of colonial first. Even though these stamps portray new images of independence, it is evident that colonial traces remained.
In this way, the collection could be considered a multi-dimensional form of memory keeping, preserving both family and national histories. It reflects entities that morphed over decades, carrying traces of the past into the present and future. By digitizing and researching, I hoped to better understand these memories and their place in a wider historical timeline. Maybe, through this process, I was turning fragile and scattered materials into something organized, documented, and enduring—at least for the time being.
archiving and digitization process
Private + Physical → Digital + Public
What does it mean to take something personal and make it public?
17 years later, after admiring the collection for so long in private, I decided to digitize it and make this collection public. Yet, digitization is not just scanning: it’s a choice, a translation process, a commitment.
The digitization process itself might not be considered that interesting, consisting of a series of repetitive tasks needed to capture and categorize the collection in an efficient manner. I began the archiving process by removing each stamp gently, photographing them on a plain background under the light of a lamp. I transferred the pictures to my computer, removed the background, and cropped them closely. I renamed the files so each stamp had a unique number. I removed the duplicates and grouped each unique stamp by their country, creating a folder for each. It’s tedious work, but satisfying: bringing order to something disorganized, creating meaning from something I knew little about.
Then came the research process, where I mainly relied on any text I could decipher on the stamp and Google Image Search to provide an understanding of what the stamp contained. With this, I was able to cross reference between Colnect, Wikipedia, and other homegrown sites maintained by stamp enthusiasts such as Mauritius Philatelic Corner. Through this process, it became evident that stamp research was very much alive on the internet: supported by forums, personal blogs, tiny .org websites run by passionate archivists and collectors who make their findings available to the rest of us. The philatelic internet is generous and meticulous and this small archive I have put together is really just a fraction of what is out there. Colnect, established in 2008, has, as of March 2025, reached 1.5 million stamps, a milestone that is largely thanks to all of its dedicated contributors and editors. I was, and still am, amazed that every image I searched ended up having digital traces online. Some stamps led to post-independence iconography. Others traced to native species, Olympic athletes, obscure anniversaries. I collected the informative links that seemed reliable and wrote captions, feeding findings into a spreadsheet.
It’s easy to frame the act of digitization as a solely technical process involving robotic, mechanical tasks: scanning, editing, file compression, and labelling. But archives and their constituent objects are also infrastructures of emotion and memory. They hold grief, pride, nostalgia, and context that might not be found from a simple reverse image search, even if I were to scour the web for clues and explore every link or keyword. Working through each stamp, I thought of my mother and uncle as children, separating each stamp from a piece of household mail, carrying the collection with them as they moved their lives across borders, which I have continued to preserve. I will never quite know the full meaning of each stamp, or what exactly this collection meant to my mom and uncle as children. From what they recall, it was a form of play and a pastime, something to keep with them and look back on.
My uncle, grandmother, and mom at Port Louis Harbor in Mauritius
digitization changes meaning
When a stamp moves from paper to pixel, what’s lost? What’s gained?
Texture shifts. A scanned stamp is all visual, no paper feel, glue traces, or jagged perforations and tears. But in digitizing, with the collapse of context, something else happens. Each stamp, when pulled out of the album and into a separate archive, gains an independence. It becomes searchable, rearrangeable, reinterpretable, and links to further references on the web. It becomes indexed across decades, borders, taxonomies.
In this new space, subtle decisions were made through the translation process. What would get foregrounded? What pieces could be included in the caption? I had to decide which links were authoritative and would be likely to last as time moves on. Through these decisions, the digital collection mirrored the physical one, but contained new contexts and patterns. In being placed on the web in a hypertext format, the collection of stamps took a new form. The collection was now represented in various web-based formats: a floating cloud of stamps that you could navigate in 3D space, a grid of images, a dedicated page for each stamp with details uncovered throughout my research process.
on the responsibility of preservation
Maintaining this online archive takes care and contemplation. While not a large-scale public project, it holds personal weight. I aim to check the site periodically, fix broken links, pay the hosting costs. I wonder how I can preserve this in 10, 20, 50 years, or if it should be deprecated eventually. Will this site, along with my other ones, be preserved or collected by someone besides me in the future? Will they also take on new shapes?
The digital archive is more accessible than the album, but also more ephemeral. Who will stumble upon it? What happens if the server fails? If I forget to renew my domain? If the underlying code and infrastructure is no longer supported in newer internet browsers and devices?
The cloud, even with all its metaphors of immortality, is not forever.
Still, I’m glad it exists. I am glad I can share this new form of the stamp collection with my family to show them I care about their memories, our shared history. I hope it inspires others to look again at the objects in their lives. The photo albums, the handwritten letters and recipes, the scraps. Archives don’t have to be grand and overarching establishments. They just have to be loved and cared for.