Rebecca Manson: Restoring Memories in the Wake of Japan’s Disaster
By BRENNEN JENSEN
Contributor
February 19, 2012 | Read Time: 1 minute
What she did: Led an effort to clean, restore, and replicate thousands of photographs that were damaged during last year’s tsunami in Japan.
Why she did it: Ms. Manson traveled to Japan to help with the tsunami recovery with All Hands Volunteers, a nonprofit in Carlisle, Mass. While there, she found thousands of dirty and damaged photos amid the debris and made them her focus. “People underestimate the importance of photographs until you lose them all,” she says.
How she did it: Armed with little more than a scanner and a laptop, Ms. Manson used free cloud servers to store and share the images. She used social-networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to recruit more than 200 volunteers with skills in photo manipulation.
What she accomplished: More than 150,000 photographs were cleaned and worldwide volunteers restored more than 320 severely damaged photos.
“The important thing is keeping it simple,” Rebecca Manson says. “I knew I could get those photographs out to restorers and then back to their owners. I just worked off that simple idea and found a way to make it happen.”
Technology for Good
This profile is part of a series about the 10 winners of the 2012 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award. Select other profiles from the menu below.
