The other week we mentioned you should store your optical media somewhere with a stable and regulated temperature. This is a good general rule for all archival material, but is particularly true for CD-RWs aka rewritable CDs.

CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray. What’s the difference exactly?

If you were around at the peak of cassettes, then you might have heard that electronics can erase a tape. We’re here to confirm that rumor is true!

If you’ve ever played a record or even just perused a record shop, you’re probably thinking duh.

The other week we talked about a type of degradation that only happens to certain audiovisual (AV) materials, but can you tell your AV materials apart enough to know which?

Paper is one of the most common materials found in archives and personal collections. It’s also one of the most vulnerable. It can fade, tear, mold, or crumble, especially if it’s stored in the wrong environment or handled carelessly. Whether you're preserving family letters, legal records, or historic documents, this guide walks you through the basics of keeping paper in good shape for the long haul.

Books are often some of the most beloved and heavily used items in a personal or institutional collection. Whether you’re caring for a Civil War-era family Bible, a 20th-century community cookbook, or a first edition stored in special collections, books require thoughtful handling and storage. This guide walks through the basics of book preservation so you can keep yours in good shape for years to come.

Photographs are some of the most treasured items in any personal or institutional collection. Whether you're looking at a studio portrait from 1880 or a Polaroid from your childhood, photographs have a way of collapsing time. But they’re also some of the most fragile materials in our care. This guide breaks down practical ways to care for photographs, with an eye toward long-term preservation, whether you’re working with family photos or historical archives.

Audio and visual materials are some of the most fragile formats in our collections. Whether you're managing a community archive, overseeing a museum collection, or simply preserving family memories, it’s important to understand how these materials work and what they need to survive. This guide offers a practical overview of how to handle, store, and preserve physical AV materials, from early wax cylinders to VHS tapes.

Archival collections face all kinds of threats, from mold and bugs to acidic ink and overzealous researchers. Learning how to recognize damage before it spreads is one of the most important skills you can develop when caring for a collection. While not every issue calls for professional conservation, understanding what you’re looking at can help you make better decisions about triage, treatment, and preservation. This blog breaks down common types of damage you’ll encounter and what to do when you spot them.

If you’ve ever inherited a back room full of boxes, tried to answer a research request without knowing what’s in your collection, or found yourself overwhelmed by too many storage decisions and not enough policies, then you’ve probably wished someone could just come in and tell you what to do. That’s what an archival needs assessment is for.

At some point in your metadata journey, especially if you’ve wrangled with Dublin Core or EAD, you may have stumbled across MODS and thought, “That looks nice, but where does it fit?” If you’ve ever tried to make sense of this XML-based schema that promises to be more detailed than Dublin Core but less complicated than MARC, you are not alone

Web archiving can feel intimidating at first. It’s technical, it’s evolving, and the stakes are high. If your institution isn’t saving its web presence, you could lose key records of events, programs, leadership, and community engagement that only ever lived online. This post walks through the basics of how to actually do web archiving, breaking down the tools, steps, and decision-making involved.

Web archiving might sound like a technical niche or a futuristic concern, but in reality, it’s already shaping how history is remembered. From saving deleted political statements to preserving pandemic response websites, web archives are a vital piece of our cultural memory. But what exactly is a web archive? How did this format come to exist? And what makes it “archival”?

Archiving email sounds tedious. Boring, even. But if you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through your inbox looking for something important, only to feel buried under newsletters, password resets, and photos from 2017, you already understand why organizing and preserving email matters. Whether you’re working as an archivist, helping a small organization manage its digital records, or just trying to get your personal email under control, this post is here to help.

If you’ve ever tried to make a digital file last longer than the device it was created on, you already understand why digital preservation matters. But how do we actually preserve digital objects? How do we make sure they’re usable, understandable, and retrievable ten, twenty, or even fifty years from now?

That’s where metadata comes in. And for digital preservation, one metadata standard stands at the center: PREMIS.

There’s a lot out there about how to arrange and describe archival collections. This post is less about the nitty-gritty of how to decide where to file the “1974 Correspondence” and more about how to build a plan that lets you get the work done in a sustainable, realistic, and thoughtful way. We'll talk about what goes into a solid arrangement and description work plan, how to create one, what kinds of questions you should ask along the way, and how to estimate time and effort. Plus, I’ll share a few examples of collections I’ve worked on and how those plans changed in real time.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll probably know that paper, when left to its own devices, will yellow and turn brittle. But did you know film can do something similar too?

Archival supplies are essential to preserving the collections we care for, but navigating the market can be confusing. The word "archival" is often used as a marketing term and does not indicate adherence to any specific standard or certification. That means archivists, librarians, and caretakers of collections must be equipped with the knowledge to evaluate what materials are safe, stable, and appropriate for long-term preservation.

Digitization is never just scanning. It is a multifaceted project that requires thoughtful planning, purposeful execution, and a long-term strategy for preservation and access. In this session, we’re focusing on five core areas that underpin a successful digitization project: foundational planning questions, practical considerations, technical requirements, metadata and description, and ongoing preservation.