“People want to preserve memories of the past: personal memories, family memories, and even broader historically or culturally significant memories. It’s not a new phenomenon. Institutional archives and household attics alike are filled with testaments in the form of preserved letters, journals, photographs, scrapbooks, vital documents, family Bibles, and more.
Thanks to ever-evolving technology, however, preserving the memory of yesteryear has gone beyond the careful storage and handling of paper-based materials…In an article in Nature, Jeremy Leighton John of The British Library writes, “With the emergence of personal computing in the 1970s, more and more people are passing on details of their lives to future generations as digital files.” – Danielle Conklin, Cotton Gloves Research, in ‘Personal Archiving: Preserving our Digital Heritage’ edited by Donald T. Hawkins.
William Man Archives Services can help you get to grips with your preserved documents whether in shoeboxes or on hard drives, with your photographs old and new, and much more. We can help with de-cluttering by assisting you to make decisions on what to keep and what to discard. We can help improve access to your meaningful records and memories by arranging and documenting them methodically and we can help you ensure they are available and intelligible for future generations.
William Man Archives Services offers clients bespoke guidance and practical assistance informed by professional principles and standards to ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of their important records and documents, digital and analogue.
This website developed out of work undertaken by William Man to arrange and catalogue the personal and professional papers of Nigel Frith as part of his Masters dissertation on archive theory and practice. William has a Bachelors degree in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, a Masters in Information Management from City University, London, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management from University College London.
Following his undergraduate degree William worked for several years at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library before completing his Masters. He has subsequently worked in the Library and Archives Services of King’s College, London, and the Archives of the Jesuits in Britain. Since completing the professional qualification in Archives and Records Management he has specialised in assisting individuals and families arrange, manage, preserve and present the records of their professional, personal and family lives in order to secure a coherent and enduring documentary legacy for future generations.
William Man Archives Services offers a consultation and survey service that will help clients identify their archival material and provide practical guidance and planning that will inform clients on how best to manage and preserve their material over time.
In addition to this, William Man Archives Services can undertake a range of specific tasks on clients’ preserved materials that will aid their management, preservation and accessibility in the long-term. Examples of these tasks include, amongst others:
- Assisting you with appraisal of your material to ensure significant records are retained and the superfluous removed.
- Arranging your materials in a meaningful and unified scheme.
- Creating finding aids such as a box/file list or catalogue of your materials.
- Identifying risks to your material, analogue and digital, advising on storage requirements and re-housing fragile materials in appropriate containers.
- Capturing additional information about your materials to enrich their meaning for you and others (for instance recording information about photographs e.g. who, when, where and why).
- Advising on or undertaking digitisation of your analogue materials where appropriate.
William Man Archives Services can also offer life-story interviews to clients as a stand-alone service or as part of a larger archiving process. Life-story interviewing involves the planning and recording of interviews to capture the voices and memories of individual family members, colleagues and friends and providing guidance on how to manage the recordings for posterity.
For more information or to discuss your requirements please email or call on:
Email: wmarchiveservices@gmail.com
Telephone: 07745 145237