Preservation Archives - Permanent.org

How to Tell a Story in One Gigabyte

Alexa Stickler — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:47:08 +0000

Building a personal archive isn’t about uploading as many files as possible. It’s about choosing the right ones to tell a complete story. A good story in an archive has layers. It might include a few photos, a short video clip, or a voice recording. Different formats bring out different sides of the story. Your free 1 GB gives you room to do this. It can hold around 10,000 PDF documents, 12 hours of audio, a few minutes of 4K video, or a few hundred high-quality photos. That’s more than enough to capture a chapter of your life. It could be something like a wedding, the small business you built, or the first few years ...

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Documenting Local Stories Builds Community Identity

Alexa Stickler — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 21:46:01 +0000

Preserving your story isn’t just about memory. It’s about identity, belonging, and connection. When we document local stories, we help build stronger, more inclusive communities. And the best part? It all starts with you.

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Behind the Scenes: Digital Preservation at the Peale

Amanda Meeks — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:31:17 +0000

At Permanent.org, we believe that preserving community stories should be accessible to all. In this guest blog post, we spotlight a recent Byte4Byte internship at The Peale in Baltimore, where University of Maryland graduate student Nicolas Lizarralde helped organize and add metadata to their Out of the Blocks oral history collection. His work not only helped make these powerful community voices more accessible, but also provided The Peale with a clearer path toward sustainable digital preservation. The post is written by both Heather Shelton, the Peale’s Digital Curator, and Nicolas. Heather Shelton: At The Peale in Baltimore, community voices are at the heart of everything we do. Housed in the oldest purpose-built museum building in ...

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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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3-2-1 Backup Rule: Keeping Your Digital Files Safe for the Long Haul

Alexa Stickler — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 18:31:27 +0000

The 3-2-1 Rule is designed to create multiple layers of protection for your digital files, ensuring you’re never left without access to your important data.

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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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The King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center Archive

The Permanent Team — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 19:32:56 +0000

This month, we are delighted to announce the public unveiling of the King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center Archive. As one of our Byte4Byte partners, the Center has worked tirelessly to make their collections accessible through a digital archive on Permanent. Keep reading to learn about the creation and value of this archive, which holds significant educational and historical benefit for current and future generations. Throughout this blog, you will find items from the Center’s collection that capture its rich history. We spoke with Brieanah Gouveia, the Curator of Collections & Programs, who shared with us some information about the Center and their collections on Permanent. She explains that the collection houses records “from the ...

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The Ron Vincent Archive

The Permanent Team — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:31:17 +0000

In our last blog post, you saw how publishing your materials in our Permanent Public Gallery helps your loved ones remember you for who you are. Public archives allow you to author your story, in your own words, in a way that reflects the legacy you wish to leave behind. Beyond that, you can also honor the memories of your loved ones by curating a public archive that captures their life’s joys and triumphs. “The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.” ~Czesław Miłosz Permanent member Ron Vincent has used his public archive to carry forth the memory of his late wife, Susie. Ron explains that ...

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Share Your Unique Story in the Permanent Public Gallery

The Permanent Team — Tue, 14 May 2024 14:26:00 +0000

Publishing materials helps ensure that you are remembered for who you are. During March of 2024 we ran the first cohort of our Legacy Lab program. The program was designed to help our members get started by giving them step-by-step instructions on how to tell a single story using our platform, resulting in several new public archives in the Permanent Public Gallery. The Permanent Public Gallery is how we celebrate the power of personal stories and the impact they can have on future generations. The Permanent Gallery is our mission realized, as the rich collection of public archives creates numerous opportunities for people to educate themselves and learn about our broad historical past. When you ...

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Public Archive Spotlight: The I Defend Rights – Memria x Norwegian Human Rights Fund Archive

The Permanent Team — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:35:06 +0000

All people have a legacy that deserves to be preserved. In other words, we believe it is an essential human right to be able to preserve your legacy. A single story from someone who cares can inspire others to leave the world a better place. One such example of this is the “The I Defend Rights – Memria x Norwegian Human Rights Fund Archive” in our public gallery. Leveraging oral histories recorded on Memria.org, the Norwegian Human Rights Fund’s archive on Permanent acts as a place to store the stories and testimonies of those involved in making the world a better place through their defense of human rights. According to their website, the fund “works ...

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The Importance of and Opportunities for Community Archiving on Permanent

Amanda Meeks — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:48:36 +0000

Permanent supports community archiving through our Byte4Byte granting program, which allows our grantees and partners to secure 100GB of cloud storage and intern support for their unique projects and efforts in this area.

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Gathering & Transferring Your Digital Materials in One Place

Amanda Meeks — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:20:46 +0000

Transferring digital materials from external devices to a central location is an important step in getting your materials ready to add to your Permanent archive. Here’s a step-by-step guide and considerations to help you through the process. Gather digital assets and make a list. Many people have digital files, photos, and assets in a range of formats, on multiple devices, and in various cloud services. You’ll want to gather any devices that have materials you want to transfer living on them, as your first step. This could include USB drives, external hard drives, memory cards, smartphones, or any other storage devices. Additionally, you’ll want to make a list of the other places you know your ...

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Tips for Preserving Your Physical Materials

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:24:39 +0000

Even if you preserve your digital materials on Permanent.org, there’s still something undeniably special about physical archives. Whether it’s a collection of family photographs, historical documents, or cherished memorabilia, these tangible pieces of history hold unique significance and should not be discarded. However, ensuring their longevity requires proper care and preservation techniques. By following a few simple tips, you can safeguard your physical materials and pass them on to future generations in the best condition possible. Handling and Preparing Your Materials It’s crucial to understand how to handle and prepare your materials properly before you even decide where and how to store them. These simple precautions can make a world of difference in preserving your ...

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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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How to Build an Archive, One Story at a Time.

Amanda Meeks — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 20:05:20 +0000

Why are stories important? Since the dawn of human civilization, stories have been created to help us make sense of the world around us. These stories captured anything from explanations of why the sun rose every morning to harrowing escapes from animal predators. Until written languages were developed and recorded onto sheets of papyrus or clay tablets, oral histories reigned supreme. Like a game of telephone, stories told orally from person-to-person are susceptible to change as people forget, embellish, or invent new parts to the story as they pass them along from person to person. Historically, not everyone has had access to sheets of papyrus or clay tablets to record their stories. In fact, many ...

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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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Resources for Organizing and Digitizing Your Materials

Kaitlyn Jarnagin — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 15:47:44 +0000

Getting started with organizing and digitizing your materials can be a challenge. Do you feel overwhelmed by pulling all your materials together and organizing them? Do you have lots of photos in scrapbooks, documents in folders, home videos on VHS tapes, or other media that you don’t even have a player for? What equipment do you need to digitize your materials? What settings are best for different media types? We’ve compiled some resources for organizing and digitizing your own materials to help you get started. It’s hard to find comprehensive resources for organizing and digitizing your materials at home. We’ve done the research for you so you can focus on the important work of organizing ...

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