The picture shows two men standing behind a barbed-wire fence near where Canyon View Junior High School now stands in this Utah County community. For Louise Wallace, the picture is a priceless glimpse at a piece of little-known history: The men depicted were German soldiers, captured during World War II and sent to work on Orem fruit farms.

"I looked at that picture the first time and didn't know we had a POW camp here," Wallace, the city's library director, said. "But one older man told us how, when he was a boy, he remembered going up to the barbed-wire fence and talking to the men, and sometimes they would give him candy."

It's that kind of history that Wallace and the city's Historic Preservation Commission are trying to bring to light and save. The city is creating a digital archive of such historical photos. After tackling three collections of historic images, Wallace is turning to a relatively undertapped source of historic data: personal photo albums and attics.

"Everybody has pictures at home relative to Orem history," Wallace said. "But photos, over time, get lost."

The project's goal: Preserve the pictures so future generations can enjoy and learn from them.

Historian D. Robert Carter, who has written extensively on Utah County history, said photographs often contain more information than written accounts or government records.

"You can talk about a building or place, but it is hard to etch an image of it in the [mind's] eye without a photograph," Carter said. "There are so many facets of a community that people don't understand."

Wallace said the city's library is working with the commission, Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University to create electronic copies as well as archival printouts. All are part of the Mountain West Digital Library Project, which is creating an electronic repository of pictures and other priceless documents.

The process involves scanning the photo with a professional-grade photo scanner, creating an image at 600 pixels to the inch. That's twice the resolution of the typical digital photograph. It allows preservationists to preserve all the fine detail in a photograph, as well as make high-quality, poster-size prints for display.

Wallace said the originals are returned to their owners, unless they choose to donate them to the library or the UVU's special collections.

So far, the digitizers have tackled the city's own collection of photos, as well as the Orem Heritage Museum collection and the photos belonging to preservation commission founder Lon Bowen.

He started his private collection for the same reason the city is digitizing images: to create a visual record of Orem's history.

As he has used the photos in slide shows to teach residents about the history of the city, he's gotten more pictures from people wanting to share their own pieces of history.

For Bowen, the photos can tell the story of how the city developed from an arid, sagebrush-covered bench to the bustling, lush community of today.

That change is dramatically illustrated in a photo showing a man, in 1912, working at the Olmstead Power Plant. The worker is reading a book sitting next to generating equipment - using a coal-oil lamp.

"Here he is, generating 44,000 volts of electricity to send to [the] Mercur [mine], but he has to read by a coal-oil lamp," Bowen said. The times were in "a state of transition."

Wallace said pictures don't have to be works of art, or depict some great event, to be considered historic. Many were likely considered mundane when they were shot. Yet, because they preserve moments in time, they are valuable historic records, Wallace said, especially when seen as part of a collection.

For example, she said a series of pictures taken along Orem's State Street over various decades tells the story of the city's growth.

Eventually, as copyright and identity issues are resolved, Wallace hopes to put the collection online, where others can view them and learn more about Orem's history.

dmeyers@sltrib.com

How to submit a photograph

* IF YOU WANT TO HELP with Orem's photo-digitization project, call Louise Wallace at 801-229-7047. Wallace said the project will accept pictures taken as recently as the 1980s.

* IF YOU DO SUBMIT A PHOTO, try to have as much information as possible, such as when and where it was taken, the names of people and places depicted, as well as who took it. Wallace said in some cases the city may need to get a photographer-signed copyright release to publicly display the image.