Our Features Archives - Permanent.org

March 2025 Product Updates

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:24:43 +0000

What We’re Working On March wraps up the first quarter of the year, and our team has been working on a number of improvements that will hopefully make a big difference in our members’ ability to connect with others through the preservation work they’re doing on Permanent. We know that you preserve your legacy or a legacy that’s important to you on Permanent in the hopes that someone – whether that be your loved ones or your great-great-great grandchild – will find meaning in your stories. We are dedicated to improving the sharing and collaboration experience on Permanent so you can focus on capturing and telling your stories. Share with others without a Permanent account ...

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February 2025 Product Updates

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 17:44:13 +0000

What We’re Working On Each quarter, our engineers spend the first two weeks prioritizing “potholes” – updates, improvements, and bug fixes that might slip through the cracks with all the other projects they’re working on. This includes updating other open-source software and libraries that Permanent depends on and improvements that help to create a better code environment for our engineers. Our engineering team worked on some of those improvements in January and has now shifted gears to our larger projects. It might seem like there are fewer visible changes this month on Permanent, but that’s only because there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work happening! Read on for some projects we’re focused on and a few ...

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December 2024 Product Updates

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 20:04:22 +0000

What We’re Working On Wow, what a year it has been for us at Permanent! We have been working on a number of projects, and have managed to wrap up many of them. Read below for an update on what we’re working on and what we’ve accomplished lately. New files uploaded are processed by Archivematica: Our back-end engineer, Liam, has been very busy this year working to integrate Archivematica as our preservation processing system in the back end. As of this month, when you upload a file on Permanent and view it in your archive, you’re seeing an access copy that was generated by Archivematica! It likely doesn’t look any different to our users, but ...

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November 2024 Product Updates

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 16:16:52 +0000

What We’re Working On As we begin wrapping up the year, the Permanent team is working diligently to close out some major projects that have been ongoing this year. Continue Archivematica Integration Work: This quarter, our back-end engineer, Liam, is working on displaying Archivematica-generated access copies of your files in your archive. This is a major milestone for this project! While you will likely not see any difference, new files displayed on Permanent will have been processed using Archivematica. Release Onboarding UI on Web: While the team is almost finished with implementing the changes to the user interface of archive creation on the web, we are making some important changes to how we release new ...

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September 2024 Product Updates

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 13:46:46 +0000

What We’re Working On At Permanent, we work on a quarterly cadence on several big projects. September wraps up the third quarter of the year, and our team has been working on a number of important projects that we hope to wrap up this month. Below are some highlights about the progress we’ve made this quarter on these projects (check out July’s Product Updates blog post for more information about these projects). Continue Archivematica Integration Work: The Permanent application has previously used multiple sizes of thumbnails across the platform. Archivematica only generates one size. The engineering team decided which size to generate, and added the new thumbnail fields to the appropriate database tables. Staff Admin ...

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Product Updates – July 2024

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:04:34 +0000

At Permanent, our mission is to preserve and provide access to the rich and varied stories of all people for the educational benefit of the future. We aim to provide you with the tools you need to preserve your legacy. We are constantly working on improving our platform to provide you with a better experience and more functionality to accomplish your goals. To keep you informed about new features and any requests you may have submitted to us, we have created two resources: our Product Roadmap and our Member Improvements List. Our updated Product Roadmap outlines major projects that the Permanent team is working on and their approximate completion dates. We try to keep this ...

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Public Archive Spotlight: The Cohen-Snyder Family Archive

The Permanent Team — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 15:12:56 +0000

In 1888, at the age of eighteen, Micheal Cohen came to America. He established himself in New York City and soon sent for his wife, Freida, to bring her from Minsk to Manhattan. Together they would have eight children. Micheal was Jewish and spoke Yiddish as his first language. He was conscripted into the Russian Army, but felt he had “little desire to serve a country that segregated and discriminated against his faith.” Deciding then to leave Russia for America, he sought work in the fashion industry, eventually finding success alongside several of his sons. One of Micheal and Freida’s daughters, Rose, would marry shoe merchant Morris Snyder —also a child of Jewish immigrants from ...

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Public Archive Spotlight: The Chas. E Martin Archive

The Permanent Team — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 18:48:59 +0000

In a world that moves at breakneck speed, it’s easy to lose touch with our roots, the stories that bind us, and the people who shaped our lineage. The holiday season is the perfect time to gather your friends and family together to celebrate the traditions from the past that you’ve carried into the future. Public archives on Permanent make it easy to stay tethered to your family’s rich history, both past and present. This season, we’d like to shine a spotlight on the Chas. E. Martin Archive which acts as a hub for Chas.’s family to access photos of cherished faces and moments from the past. An Enduring Family Story “Family is everything. People ...

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Data Transfer Improvements

Cecilia Krum — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 22:15:33 +0000

Over the past few months at Permanent, we’ve made it possible to transfer data and storage in some new ways.

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Legacy Planning is HERE!

Amanda Meeks — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:39:12 +0000

We are so excited to share our newest feature, Legacy Planning, with you!

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Five Things We’ve Learned About Legacy Planning

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:40:56 +0000

A vital part of Permanent.org’s original manifesto and long term plan includes creating a way for members to determine how their digital legacy on Permanent.org will be managed beyond their lifetime. In 2022, we began planning how to best implement a legacy planning feature by researching best practices, creating a workable prototype, and having members of our community and our partners provide feedback about the prototype and about legacy planning in general. Over the three months that we surveyed our members and partners about the legacy planning prototype, we received feedback from 40 people. Here are five takeaways we learned from our members about legacy planning and how we’re using that feedback to inform the ...

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Love (Meta)Data with Permanent.org

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 21:52:07 +0000

Every year during the week of Valentine’s Day, universities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, corporations and individuals join together to celebrate Love Data Week, an international celebration of data. At Permanent, we’re celebrating Love Data Week by sharing with you our new and upcoming changes to metadata features on Permanent.org. A preserved file without description and context isn’t truly preserved, so Permanent.org provides basic metadata fields as well as extended metadata options to ensure that anyone can use metadata to capture their most cherished stories and memories. We value hearing from our members so we can make a platform that meets diverse needs and adheres to the changing standards and best practices of preservation. Recently, we ...

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Sharing & Connecting Over Family Treasures with Lynn Busath

Amanda Meeks — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 16:39:29 +0000

We are excited to shine the community spotlight on Lynn Busath, genealogist and creator of the Paxman - Moody Archive on Permanent.

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Prepare a Shared Folder for Your Next Special Occasion

Robert Friedman — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 06:46:48 +0000

Preparing for an upcoming celebration with Permanent.org is as simple as setting the table for your family and friends. Shared folders are a safe and secure way to gather and preserve the memory of your important traditions. They keep your family and friends connected throughout the years. Shared folders make it possible for you and all the special people in your life to easily collect and enjoy your photos, videos, and documents together. Here’s why you should add a shared folder to your event planning checklist. Traditions Are The Stories That We Write Together We all have special traditions that we cherish and hold dear, whether they are observed with our family, our friends, our ...

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Writing Software That is Built to Last

Amanda Meeks — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 17:27:31 +0000

We’re taking a moment to shine a spotlight on Liam Lloyd, our Senior Software Engineer.

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Archive in the Moment with the Share to Permanent Mobile Feature

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 17:09:37 +0000

It can be a challenge to find the time to preserve the files that make up your digital legacy. Now, ensuring that those memories are preserved only takes a few extra taps. We are excited to announce the Share to Permanent feature on the Permanent mobile apps, which helps you actively preserve important files with ease as you create or receive them. The Share to Permanent feature adds the Permanent app to the share menu on your mobile device. This allows you to export photos and files to Permanent from your email, text message, or any location on your mobile device, without opening the Permanent app. With Share to Permanent, you don’t have to save ...

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There’s More in Store for Our Members

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 15:26:19 +0000

We are excited to announce the release of our Permanent.org Product Roadmap – an outline of our development plans to make Permanent.org a more robust and easy to use platform for anyone to preserve their digital legacy. The Permanent.org Product Roadmap is published in our GitHub repository. The roadmap sketches out an estimated timeline for releasing new features and major updates to the Permanent.org application. We created this Product Roadmap to keep our members better informed about what we’re working on and build excitement around upcoming improvements and features. The Experience Team and Engineering Team collaborated on writing the roadmap so that it reflects major user experience improvements, members’ feedback and experiences, and the design ...

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Preserve Your Holiday or Event on the Go with the Permanent Mobile Apps

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:08:36 +0000

With the launch of our new iOS and Android mobile apps, it’s easier than ever to preserve your memories from a special vacation, a holiday, a birthday, an anniversary, or a family reunion. We created the Permanent mobile apps because we know that you’re already using your mobile device to capture special moments and memories. We wanted to make it even easier for you to preserve those photos and videos from your summer vacation, your grandchild’s birthday party, your Memorial Day gathering, or your family reunion on your phone and on the go.

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Onboarding Improvements at Permanent.org

Cecilia Krum — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 15:28:22 +0000

As of this month, when a new member joins Permanent, they are prompted to create their first archive or join an archive that they were invited to collaborate on by an existing member.

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From Permanent.org to the Internet Archive in Just One Click

Robert Friedman — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 19:50:41 +0000

At Permanent, we enjoy making it easy for you to share your archives. Sometimes that sharing is private. It might mean making sure everybody in your family can enjoy the mementos of a journey across generations. At other times, we want to help you submit your media more widely— to research efforts and public collections like the Internet Archive, for example. To help with that, we have made some improvements to Permanent that let you send files to the Internet Archive with just one click. What is the Internet Archive you ask? It is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Their mission is to provide Universal Access ...

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Upgrades to Uploads

Dan Schultz — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 18:54:52 +0000

Over the past few months the Permanent engineering team has been hard at work making fundamental improvements to the way people upload data to their archives. A lot of these changes work behind the scenes, but they were a massive undertaking that is core to the Permanent mission so we wanted to share a little bit about what got done, why, and what we thought about when we designed the new architecture. The Before Times Last year the Permanent code base was having troubles with uploads. This was a serious problem because uploading content for permanent storage is kind of an important part of what people want to do when they sign up for Permanent! The symptoms were clear enough: ...

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