Six Small Disciplines for a Family Archive: Paper, Damp and the Digital Copy

A family archive is not a museum. It is a working collection, usually kept in a house, often in a spare room, and almost always assembled by people who did not set out to become archivists. That is why the most useful advice is rarely grand. It consists of small disciplines: habits that prevent a box of papers from becoming a box nobody can read.

The archival spirit behind the Ladislaus Lob site — notes from a life, kept in the archive — is a reminder that preservation is not a single act of scanning or storage. It is a continuing relationship with material. In a British climate, that relationship has to reckon with damp, fluctuating temperatures and the ordinary pressures of domestic space. The six points below are not a complete conservation manual. They are a practical starting point for households that want to keep paper well and make a digital copy that will still make sense later.

1. Begin with an inventory, not a scanner

The temptation, when a family archive is first taken seriously, is to buy a scanner and start digitising everything. That is usually the wrong order. Before a single file is created, make a simple inventory: what exists, roughly how much, where it is kept and what condition it is in. A spreadsheet is sufficient. Record the box, the room, the type of material and any obvious problems such as water stains, mould, insect damage or fading.

The inventory does two things. It stops the project from becoming an undifferentiated mountain, and it gives you a record of what was present before any conservation or scanning took place. In a family setting, that record is itself part of the archive. It tells later readers what was kept, what was moved and what was, for whatever reason, set aside. A clear inventory is also the best defence against the common pitfall of scanning the most interesting items twice while the dull but important papers remain unexamined.

2. Scan for the archive, not for the screen

Scanning pitfalls are rarely about equipment failure. They are about purpose. A photograph scanned at low resolution for a slideshow may look acceptable on a laptop and useless as a preservation copy. A letter scanned as a compressed JPEG may be readable today and illegible after a few rounds of file conversion. For family papers, the aim is a master copy that can be used to produce other versions, not a display image that happens to be convenient.

As a working rule, scan photographs at 600 dpi where practical, and text documents at 600 dpi if they are to be OCR’d or if the paper is fragile; 300 dpi may be adequate for routine correspondence, but it leaves less room for future enlargement. Save a master file in a lossless format such as TIFF, and keep a PDF/A copy for reading and sharing. Avoid automatic document feeders for torn, curled or fragile paper. Clean the scanner glass, use a colour target if colour accuracy matters, and do not over-sharpen the image to make it look brighter on screen. The master copy should record the object, not flatter it.

3. Keep paper away from the British damp

Damp is the quiet enemy of a domestic archive. British houses are not uniformly damp, but many have cold external walls, unheated spare rooms, lofts that swing between extremes and cellars that are unsuitable for paper. The garage, the loft and the cellar are therefore poor default choices, however convenient they seem. Paper dislikes fluctuation as much as it dislikes moisture. A stable, ventilated room is better than a warm room that is sometimes cold.

Aim for a domestic environment that is dry and reasonably stable. Keep boxes off concrete floors and away from external walls. Do not store paper directly under a window or against a radiator. If a room feels damp, address the cause before adding silica gel; desiccant can help in a sealed box, but it is not a substitute for fixing a leak or improving ventilation. Check stored boxes periodically for signs of mould, which often appears as a powdery bloom or a musty smell. If mould is present, isolate the affected material and seek conservation advice rather than wiping it casually.

4. Store flat, separate the harmful and resist the tidy-up

Family papers often arrive with elastic bands, paperclips, pins and adhesive tape. These are not neutral. Rubber perishes and stains; metal rusts; tape yellows and embrittles. Remove them carefully, using a spatula or blunt tool rather than fingernails, and note any damage you cause or discover. Store documents flat in acid-free folders and boxes. If an item is too large to lie flat, roll it around a conservation-grade tube rather than folding it again along the same crease.

Separate newspaper cuttings from letters and photographs. Newsprint is acidic and will migrate its problems to neighbouring paper. Interleave with acid-free tissue where necessary. Photographs should not be stored in the same envelope as documents if avoidable, and negatives and prints are best kept in suitable sleeves. Resist the urge to tidy by trimming, mounting with ordinary glue or rewriting annotations. A pencilled note in the margin may be part of the document’s history. If you must add information, use a soft pencil on a separate slip rather than ink on the original.

5. Name files as if a stranger must find them

A digital archive fails as often through naming as through corruption. Files called scan001, scan002 and IMG_2043 are technically preserved and practically lost. Adopt a simple naming convention and apply it consistently: a date in ISO form, a short description and, where relevant, a place or family name. For example, 1968-07-14_letter_evans_to_mother. Avoid special characters that may cause problems across systems, and keep folder structures shallow enough to be understood by someone who was not present when the files were created.

Add contextual metadata where you can: who is in the photograph, where it was taken, what the letter refers to. A scan without a caption is only half an archive. Keep a separate index that links the digital file to the physical item and its box. That index does not need to be elaborate, but it should be readable in ordinary software and stored with the collection. The test is simple: could a family member in twenty years’ time find this item without telephoning you?

6. Make the copy safe, then leave instructions

Digitisation is not preservation unless the digital copy is backed up. Use a simple three-part approach: keep the working copy on a computer, keep a second copy on an external drive stored elsewhere in the house, and keep a third copy off-site or with a trusted relative. Check the backups periodically. A drive that has not been opened for five years is a hope, not a backup. Store master files in open or widely supported formats, and keep checksums if you are comfortable doing so; they help detect silent corruption.

Finally, write brief instructions. Explain where the physical archive is kept, what the naming system means, which files are masters and which are access copies, and who should be contacted if something goes wrong. Leave the instructions with the collection and with a family member. The most carefully scanned archive in the country is still vulnerable if only one person knows how it is arranged. Small disciplines, repeated over time, are what keep paper and its digital shadow together. They are not glamorous, but they are the difference between an archive and a box of guesses.