How-To Guides

Want to start your own personal or community archive, but don’t know where to start? Look no further! Below are different guides to help get you started!


Home Archiving

Safeguarding and Sharing Your Home Archive

Maintaining a vibrant and safe home archive.
Do you have documents or photographs in your house that you would like to keep for your children or grandchildren, or materials that have been passed down to you? Are you the default “archive” for records related to your family, or do you document your community or town by collecting historical materials or oral histories?
As a home archivist, you play an important role in caring for materials relating to your community, organizations, and family and keeping them for future generations.

Working with Digital Materials and Digitizing Historical Materials

Prioritize your digital files for preservation, safeguard and store your files, and digitize paper items

Think about the documents stored on your computer: milestones relating to your career, photographs of your kids, a long email from a beloved family member. Many people have items on their computers, on hard drives, or in emails that hold important personal meaning and tell significant stories about their lives.
These materials can include items created in digital form (sometimes called “born digital”) or scanned photographs, documents, videos, and audio recordings. Digital materials are fragile and require special care so that they can be used in the future. New technologies, changing software, and computer or hard drive crashes can make it difficult to access old files.

Additional Resources

Personal Archiving, Preserving Your Digital Memories from the Library of Congress


Working with Repositories

Collaborating with Archives and Cultural Heritage Institutions on Community Memory Projects

Find and create a sustainable and equitable partnership to help your community history thrive
If you have deep knowledge or have
built a collection of materials about a town, community, historical event, or movement, you may be looking for ways to preserve this information and share it more widely. Partnering with an archive, museum, library, or similar organization may help you achieve these goals.

Donating Your Materials to an Archive

One of the most lasting things you can do is contribute your own historical materials to an archive, special collections library, historical society, or museum. From personal letters to family photographs to business records, your collection
contributes to a more inclusive historical record. A repository can provide long-term preservation of your materials, while also allowing current and future researchers such as genealogists, writers, and students to learn from them. Even more importantly, the work you have done can enrich your community’s collective memory.

Creating and Growing Community-Based Memory Projects

Expand and formalize your community memory project.
When people come together to preserve and share their history, the result is a community-based archive or memory project. These archives
can begin with an existing collection of historical materials, the desire to record and share many voices in the community, or the need to document the activities of a movement or group.
You may operate your community memory project independently, or you may wish to partner with a local cultural heritage organization that can help you collect, store, and display materials. You may even consider setting up an independent museum, history center, or archive.


Oral Histories

An Introduction to Oral History and Genealogy Projects

How many times have you heard someone say, “I wish I had made a recording of my grandmother while she was still living, to hear her voice and hear her describe our ancestry?” Oral history interviews and genealogy projects are a wonderful way to document family stories and create bonds around your shared history.

Oral History Question Cards

These question cards feature suggested topics and prompts to guide you through a simple oral history interview. We created them for the kits we provide to our community partners, but they are also freely available to the public (you!) to use or modify. You can print multiple pages on one piece of paper and cut them apart to make your own cards. Download the printable PDF.

Additional Resources

Oral History Resources from the Southern Oral History Program, UNC Center for the Study of the American South