All organizations, whether they are families, nonprofit groups or businesses, have documents that are important in telling their story. These historically valuable papers should be preserved – but what are the best ways to do it?
Mark Anderson is the co-founder of Anderson Archival, a company dedicated to providing digitization and archival services to preserve private collections for future generations. Anderson Archival has a variety of services to transform collections into a powerful preservation and research tool, ensuring accuracy and metadata development.
“Every business has a story to tell,” Anderson says.
Q: Why should a business (large or small) care about archiving their key documents, photos, etc.?
A: Our collective history is vital to preserve and can provide wisdom for us today, and for future generations. To those seeking insight from the past, a well curated collection of documents, photos, blueprints, and letters relating to a subject of interest would prove invaluable. I believe one of our main purposes in life is to help each other. Learning and growing from each other’s experiences, including ones hard won by those who’ve come before us, benefits each of us. Why a business was started, the individuals who labored together to nurture and support it during its formative years, how they and the business impacted the local community – these are important lessons we shouldn’t lose sight of by relegating them to the past. A well-done archival project can bring the magic of the past to life.
Q: What are the steps to doing this?
A: The best thing to do is to start! Many initial efforts at this include storage in file cabinets, bankers’ boxes, and photo albums. These practices are better than losing the documents completely but can be improved upon. We recommend storing your collection using acid-free archival materials. Boxes can be custom crafted to measure, with documents stored free from binder clips, staples, rubber bands, paperclips, sticky notes, or other interference. Items should be stacked vertically, stored in these specialty boxes, and kept in a temperature- and humidity- controlled space not prone to natural disaster such as fire or flood. Because physical storage can be plagued by disaster, we also recommend digital archiving. This will not restore the physical documents or photos in case of loss, but ensures the digital images and contents of the collection are electronically preserved and made available for future.
Q: Why did you get into this business?
A: I started out in college majoring in my first love, History, but ended up switching to Computer Science. I’ve always had a love of learning and read historical non-fiction books constantly. As a co-owner of a technology company, we were approached about 15 years ago by an organization who wished to preserve a historically significant private collection from the 1800s consisting of approximately 100,000 pages. The project included building a custom software application to allow users to easily search the digitized collection. Busy with the software development, we engaged an outside supplier to perform the scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) processing. For our next large archival project, we decided to bring the scanning, OCR, and quality control processes in-house to better control the end result. We hired English majors with detailed proofing skills, meticulous attention to detail, and a sincere desire to accurately preserve historical documents. Over the years we have created and refined a system to consistently produce excellent results. The combination of our professional document processing team with our strong technical team has been a huge asset to clients’ historical preservation projects. It’s rewarding to preserve our past because it has so many lessons to teach us!
