Things To Do At Home: Organize Your Personal Archive
WGF Archivist Hilary Swett shares some thoughts about how to be fortuitously productive.
The WGF staff is working from home, just like everyone else. And if you're anything like me, you are staring at that pile/corner/room full of important/rare/special papers, creative work, mementos or family history that you've been meaning to organize. Or perhaps it's your computer desktop or a folder where you keep your digital life, your “stuff to be filed.”
I am an archivist. One of the things I do is organize writers’ stuff that has been donated to the WGF Library and Archive. But even I fall victim to having these piles of stuff in my own life. I'm here to encourage you that now is the time to tackle it! There is no better time than when you are basically FORCED to be inside. Once you're done streaming that show you've been meaning to watch for three years, get your favorite beverage, put on some tunes and do some spring cleaning. Here are a few pro tips to get your started.
Too much paper got you down?
Approach the project like an archivist.
Treat it like a part of your job. Don't think of getting organized as an extraneous chore. In the business of being you, you have to maintain your own archive. Know that it's worth it. As a writer, you have lots of research and drafts and variations of your work. Make sure you are sending people what you mean to send and saving what you mean to save.
Break your task into manageable chunks. In archival work, to keep from being overwhelmed by stuff, we take an entire writer's collection and put things into buckets. We break it into smaller and smaller chunks until it's in a state that we are comfortable with long term. This applies to organizing physical material like papers and memorabilia, as well as digital material like photos and even browser bookmarks.
Buckets can be based on date, type of items, project-based, whatever you want. Devote 15 minutes a day to tidy up files for just one of your projects or one set of vacation pictures and you'll make great progress.
Stay focused. Resist the urge to walk down memory lane.
Treat any effort as a productive one. Doing anything is better than doing nothing! Looking through piles, deciding what your buckets are, labeling things, throwing stuff out, renaming files, organizing folders on your hard drive...it all counts in the end.
At the WGF, we store scripts in folders and toss out brads and paperclips.
Only focus on stuff that has long term value to you. In archival work, we “appraise” records and only keep what has long term value within our context. This will be different for every person but deciding what to discard is an important part of the process. Aim for Marie Kondo-style decluttering rather than the warehouse in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Preserve your materials. Common sense applies to preserving paper and analog media – keep the material in a dark, stable, temperature and humidity controlled environment. Protect from agents of deterioration like chemicals, pests, sun and rain. Storage indoors is better than outside in a shed. You generally don't need to purchase special boxes and folders but they are available if you want.
Take active steps to manage important digital files. Digital files are not going to last forever. They don’t have long term stability like paper and you don't know what you will be able to open and read in the future.
Special considerations for digital file management:
Digital files can become unreadable given a long enough time span. For example, Final Draft 11 is currently backwards compatible to earlier versions down to release 5 but the file has to be migrated to the newer version. And that's just at this moment in time. Your important digital files demand long term management and periodic “migration” from one file type to another, newer file type. This is where appraisal becomes important.
Documents look different depending on what operating system, computer or program is used to open them. PDF is a very stable format and is ubiquitous, whether the document is created from Final Draft or Word or Google Docs or whatever. The chances are high that computers will render the file true to how you originally created it.
Impose some hierarchical structure to your digital folders, just as you would paper.
Create descriptive, consistent filenames based on content, instead of the default, mysterious IMG_9053.jpg. You should be able to guess what a file is without opening it. Avoid special characters. Underscores are useful as spacers.
You could always scan/digitize paper, photos, movies, etc. as a way of preserving the content. There is lots of information available online for how to do that. The National Archives is a good place to start.
Old analog recordings and files from defunct computers, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives etc. could potentially be salvaged and put into a usable format - by you or by a professional vendor.
Make copies and keep them in different geographic locations. We've all had the dreaded hard drive crash. Protect yourself so you can recover. Your laptop has the original material. The cloud can be your backup or use an external drive. Even better is an external drive that you keep in a different location from your home or office.
Write down decisions or explanations of things that will be helpful to others or your future self. This can be on paper or saved as a digital text file in the relevant folder(s).
Much more information and strategies can be found online. Here are just a few web resources to inspire you on your journey. Now open a bottle of wine and get organizing! You can always email me at hswett@wgfoundation.org for quick guidance.
Getting Started
How to Begin a Personal Archiving Project
Caring for different types of material
Library of Congress Preservation Tips
The Atlantic: Taking Care of Your Personal Archive
The New York Times: Advice on How to Preserve Photos, Records, and Videos
NYT: Tips on Archival Family History, Part 1
NYT: Tips on Preserving Family Films and Photos
NYT: Tips on Archiving Family History, Part 3
Family Tree Magazine: How to Organize Your Family Archive
Digital Preservation