How to organise and archive
- As you accumulate the documents, photos, sounds and words that tell your story you will need to organise them so that they can be easily found. It's a good idea to replicate on the computer the way in which you organise your 'hard copies' into files and folders.
- Just what headings you give is up to you, but it's worth noting that Nations' Memorybank has themes including Family, House, Local Area, Food and Fashion that you might want to include in your cataloguing system.
- Let's imagine you have a box file in a filing cabinet that you've labelled 'Childhood'. In there are photos, old school reports, maybe a bit of film or video taken when you were young. You've also got a printout of the memories you've written about this period of your life, and the tape recording you did relating this stage of your life, together with its transcript.
- You replicate this on the hard drive of your computer with items in a digital format. Your main folder (the filing cabinet) you label 'My Memories'. Within this folder you create a number of sub-folders relating to the categories of your box files, of which 'Childhood' is one
- Within the 'Childhood' folder you then create four sub-folders - Images, Documents, Sounds, Video - and then you replicate this for all the other folders.
- You then place your digitised information into the folders. Into Images you put all your scanned and digital photos relating to that topic, together with a document containing all the photo details; you put your written memories into Documents; and so on.
- It pays to take some time to think through how you want to organise your material when planning your project, as it will save a great deal of time and confusion later.
