This site shares advice on archival management to help you set up, maintain, and provide access to small collections of personal papers, family records, and other holdings.

Toolkits contain carefully curated lists of resources for everything from caring for your collection to the fundamentals of operating a successful history organization.

From the National Archives |  Maybe a relative sent you old letters, certificates, and family photographs and you are not sure what to do. Maybe you’re wondering how to save your child’s pictures and other mementos. These simple tips will help you preserve your family papers and photographs for the next generation. Preventing damage is the key to preserving your items.

This site provides an introduction to scanning and low-cost ways to preserve family archives, and it explains the importance of digital preservation. It also shares a Personal Digital Archiving Day Kit for planning guidance and relevant information resources you can use to develop your own program.

From the start, it’s important to emphasize that we all create, use, and reuse our personal data in individual ways. Do what makes the most sense to you to manage your own digital materials. Even if it’s not practical for you to follow all of these steps, any amount of effort to preserve your digital material is better than none!

Photo by Laura Kells, the Library of Congress.

At the Library of Congress, archivists process every type of collection imaginable. They often acquire — along with scholarly and historical works — personal papers and mementos, things that had special meaning to the owner, not only letters and photos but also locks of hair, newspaper clippings and beverage-stained documents. One recent collection contained a piece of bark. Some collections arrive neatly organized and others arrive heaped into makeshift containers. How do professional archivists create order from clutter? Where do they start? And what we can we learn from their work and apply to our own personal archiving projects?

Lots of family archives are handed down in the same condition as my aunt’s: a mess of heirlooms, historical documents and, well, trash. When you’re the one in charge of dealing with the archive, it can be an overwhelming responsibility. You’ve just inherited a lifetime worth of stuff from a loved one (whom you may have recently lost). Now what do you do?