Gathering & Transferring Your Digital Materials in One Place
Transferring digital materials from external devices to a central location is an important step in getting your materials ready to add to your Permanent archive. Here’s a step-by-step guide and considerations to help you through the process. Gather digital assets and make a list. Many people have digital files, photos, and assets in a range of formats, on multiple devices, and in various cloud services. You’ll want to gather any devices that have materials you want to transfer living on them, as your first step. This could include USB drives, external hard drives, memory cards, smartphones, or any other storage devices. Additionally, you’ll want to make a list of the other places you know your …
Tips for Preserving Your Physical Materials
Even if you preserve your digital materials on Permanent.org, there’s still something undeniably special about physical archives. Whether it’s a collection of family photographs, historical documents, or cherished memorabilia, these tangible pieces of history hold unique significance and should not be discarded. However, ensuring their longevity requires proper care and preservation techniques. By following a few simple tips, you can safeguard your physical materials and pass them on to future generations in the best condition possible. Handling and Preparing Your Materials It’s crucial to understand how to handle and prepare your materials properly before you even decide where and how to store them. These simple precautions can make a world of difference in preserving your …
How to Build an Archive, One Story at a Time.
Why are stories important? Since the dawn of human civilization, stories have been created to help us make sense of the world around us. These stories captured anything from explanations of why the sun rose every morning to harrowing escapes from animal predators. Until written languages were developed and recorded onto sheets of papyrus or clay tablets, oral histories reigned supreme. Like a game of telephone, stories told orally from person-to-person are susceptible to change as people forget, embellish, or invent new parts to the story as they pass them along from person to person. Historically, not everyone has had access to sheets of papyrus or clay tablets to record their stories. In fact, many …
Kathy’s Corner: Digitizing that collection of inherited family photos
This popular monthly session focuses on a challenge for every family historian: Sorting and digitizing collections of inherited family photos and artifacts. Our speaker, Projectkin member Kathy Stone has decades of experience as a professional photo organizer and is now working on her family history projects. As a pro, she appreciates the challenge of actually getting projects done. In these “Corner” events, she answers questions and coaches members as your personal “sherpa over Mt. Inertia.” Our programs build on the 8-step approach she shared in a post and the 2023 Kathy’s Corner series. (Projectkin members have access to event recordings through the Members’ Chat Room in the Projectkin Forum.) Now the focus will be on …
Informal Archives: Capturing Family Memories
This workshop aims at collectively exploring different shapes and forms of informal family archives and oral histories’ role in keeping family memories alive. Informal family archives could include (but are not limited to): letters, photographs, clothes, audio recordings, videos, etc. Participants are encouraged to bring along and share one item from a family collection and share memories and stories associated with it. We will be discussing: tangible and intangible memories, what is an archive? And what we practically need to create one. For details see www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/informal-archives-capturing-family-memories-tickets-723721609817
