Employees in Malvern and across the 17-company Ricoh Group, totaling 518, have put their digital imaging expertise to use for a good cause by reclaiming, restoring and returning more than 90,000 of the 400,000-plus lost images found in the wake of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

This week, more than three year later, Ricoh released to the public the procedure and staff notes for its Save the Memory Project in hopes of helping others with similar disaster recovery efforts, according to a Virtual-Strategy Magazine article.

“The project involves collecting precious photos found in the disaster-affected area and cleaning them, with the help of local government and countless volunteers, and then using MFPs to digitize and store photos in the cloud so that people can search them easily,” the article stated. “Searches can be carried out on computers at local government photo centers. Once someone has found a photo they lost, the original and all associated data is returned to them via the relevant local government.

“… The driving force behind returning photos has been the determination of people affected by the earthquake and tsunami to retrieve valuable properties, irreplaceable photos, to their owners.”

Read more about Ricoh’s extensive recovery effort in Virtual-Strategy Magazine here.