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Personal Archivist: Services Provided and Costs

The basic charge for our personal archiving services is $24/hour. Therefore the total cost of a personal archiving project will depend on how long it takes to do the various things required to create an archive. To give an idea of what that comes out to in final costs, here is the approximate time required for the most common tasks:

1) Initial consultation, evaluation, recommendations - no charge

2) Digital imaging + dating/captioning:

3) Organizing the Information

4) Reconstructing a More Complete History

For some, simply having photos, documents and images of significant artifacts safely preserved and easy to access will be sufficient. Others may want to go further by recreating the timeline of their own lives or their family history to provide a more interesting narrative, and to put all the images in their proper context. This is actually the most interesting aspect of personal archiving, and we are eager to help with this. The scope of this kind of project can range from simply creating a chronology (aided by the information obtained from the photos and documents), to recording (and transribing) memorable stories, to a full-blown biography (which might be better left to a skilled writer and biographer - assisted by the archives). Of course it's difficult to estimate how time consuming such a project might be, but at least here is an outline of the steps involved: Note: at each stage in this process audio recordings will be saved, and can also be transcribed (with the assistance of speech to text software to speed up the process as much as possible). This makes the stories both readable and perhaps equally important, searchable, to make it easy to find references to events, people, and places.

5) Computer Tutoring


Bottom line estimate: services + basic tutorials

Here is a very rough guide to the total cost of a few typical personal archiving projects: