"Helping you preserve the story of your life"
Details About Personal Archiving
How Archiving works
Information gathering
- Free consultation/estimate to assess your situation, make reommendations, etc.
- Digital imaging of photos/documents/mementos
- Try to identify, date, and classify your items (optional, but very useful)
- Audio recording of captions/notes/comments/stories (optional)
and transcribe recordings [via software] for text captions and easy searching
Organizing
- Organize information by date/category/etc.
- If necessary, create an online (cloud) storage account (often free)
- If necessary edit/retouch images (optional)
- Upload all images for safe storage and access on any device
Creating a Narrative/History (all optional)
- Create a timeline of your life
- Associate images with points in timeline
- Record longer stories associated with images
(also, transcribe recordings to text [via software] for easy searching) - Make "hard copy" album or binder with images and notes
Computer Tutoring (if necessary)
Once a person's life has been archived, the archive needs to be easy to access and browse, and easy to let others (family members and friends) view. Because not everyone is familiar with the lastest technology (Windows and Mac computers, iPads and other tablets, and smartphones) and software (browsers, social networking, etc.) the PersonalArchivist team is happy to provide tutoring to simplify all of these things. These tutorials include:- The basics on how to use Windows and Mac computers, tablets (iPad and others), and smartphones (iPhone, Android)
- How to browse and share archives, whether they are stored 'in the cloud' (Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, etc.), on photo viewing sites (Picassa, Flicker), or as websites (visible in browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari)
- How to use social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to let people know about your archive and to stay in touch with them
- How to use blogging sites such as Wordpress and Tumblr to continue writing memoirs and annotations to the archives
- For those who are interested in more advanced topics we can also provide instructions for uploading to the cloud, creating and editing websites (using the tools available to make this easy), and other technical coaching
The PersonalArchivist.ca Team
Doug Rogers
Doug was born in North Bay, Ontraio in July, 1957. His father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which meant his family moved around a lot, living in Ontario, England, France, and British Columbia. That lifestyle in his youth resulted in a lifelong habit of changing where he lives: Victoria, Vancouver, Berkeley (California), Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, other parts of California, Utah, and even Paris for a while. And in between all of those places he called home he also managed to visit over 50 countries - 24 during a bicycle tour of the world, and the rest on other trips and adventures.
This lifestyle led to a fascination with personal archiving for two reasons:
- he had visited so many places and experienced so many adventures that he felt the need to keep diaries, journals, and to take tens of thousands of photographs to document his life
- because he was moving around so much he constantly had to reduce the sheer bulk of the accumulated photos, mementos, and other possessions. This meant continuous adoption of the latest technological means to document and save personal archives: first primitive personal computers, then laptops, floppy disks, zip drives, digital photography (what a blessing that was!), larger and larger hard drives, the internet (another quantum leap!), cloud storage, and now even 3D virtual reality.
In fact, personal archiving held such fascination for Doug that from 2004 - 2006 he and another software developer spent over two years and $250,000 creating a software application called "P.Bio - Your personal biographer". It created a timeline of the user's life based on data from photos, credit card and phone records (used to record purchases and conversations, and to track location - this was before GPS devices), email, social networking, and other archives from the user's life. Unfortunately it wasn't successful as a commercial product.
When Doug wasn't busy travelling and archiving he worked as an engineer for NASA, a software developer, and an internet entrepreneur (mainly in Vietnam).
Rachid Khaneboubi

Rachid's specialties are working with video and composing original music. He has combined these two talents to create video biographies documenting his family origins in Morocco. He works with our clients' archival data to create video narratives in different styles - chronological, family history, passions and adventures, etc.